I have upgraded on AT&T and performed an upgrade to 4.5.0.99 last week and noticed my File Free starting out up around 12MB and then dropping and dropping down to 0MB.
I upgraded this morning to AT&T's official .110 release and my File Free started out at 12MB and so far over the course of the day I am down to 8MB File Free. I have not even used my phone but for 1 blackberry messenger convo of 3 receives/4 sends. 1 3 minute phone call and 1 check of facebook friends status.
Other items installed:
Viigo
Facebook
MobiPocket Reader
MyAlarm
USA Today
Live Search - not opened since upgrade
Telenav - not opened since upgrade
google sync
I did a battery pull after the upgrade as well because I had a blinking red light on my led.
I am confused as to why my File Free keeps dropping. Any ideas?
It's normal for mem to drop a bit and level off. To continue to drop would be something eating your memory. Keep and eye on the memory and if it continues to drop you need to play the game called delete an app at a time to find the culprit.
yah well crud. I have been playing that unfortunate game for a bit. I am afraid it is going to be Facebook.
I never had an issue with Facebook prior to upgrading to 4.5. I will kill viigo prior to killing facebook. Does anyone know if Facebook has a fix for the memory leak? I have heard it mentioned before...but thought "Surely not MY facebook, causing a memory leak!" :-)
Haven't heard of a fix. I did have more issues with viigo before the upgrade. I've deleted and re installed that program more times than I wish to count.
Frustrating because I came from Motorola Q where I was putzing with the thing all the time to get it to do what I wanted. I LOVE my BB because I have NEVER had to putz with it once. Now this stupid memory thing has me putzing again. Once I find the culprit I will delete it permanently and not put it back on.
I am hoping it is not Facebook though because that is a highly used app on my phone.
I know I've seen a number on here that people suggest to keep your file free amount above, but I can't find it. Does anyone know what it is?
You don't need to worry about it. Available memory and "file free" are too entirely different things, and "file free" just reflects that memory which is immediately available without garbage collection by the OS. Other memory is generally available but your device has just not "collected" it so as to not impact performance while you use the device.
There is no RIM recommended minimum, because the amount of memory free will vary depending on what you are currently running in the foreground and background.
People that tell you "## MB+" etc. don't have a clue how memory management works on the Blackberry. Read the RIM documentation on their site if you really want to know how it works.
This sort of question is a bit like asking how much free RAM should you have on your desktop? It is meaningless. What matters is that memory is used by background processes too, and that means that if you have a few of those running (like when you forget to close stuff), then you will have less available for whatever foreground app you wish to run. If you start to many applications for the available RAM, because there is no "Swap", you will get sluggish, and then run out of RAM all together at which point the GC will attempt to recover some from memory released by applications.
If you find that your device is sluggish, close background applications, or reboot the device (assuming you are auto-starting a ton of apps in the background).
Even if "file free" shows as near zero, this does not mean that there is no memory available, only that the GC must first run to recover memory to use, and RIM has highly optimized the GC to do so when necessary based on system needs. Applications can happily run with extremely low "file free" because again this is not a true indication of available memory on the device.
"File free" can be useful by a user to notice the increasing consumption without release of memory which is never returned to the free store by an application. This is commonly known as a "memory leak" (although really it is a failure to release memory references, rather than a true unreferenced object in memory).
If you find that this keeps getting lower, and you have nothing running which would account for it, then you may have some mis-behaved software.
I had replied to a similar question last week with usual 12MB and was corrected by one of the experts. Seems the newer OS's require less than ever which perhaps ties into the detailed response above.
Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com
Thank you much for your detailed response. I believe that very accurately answers my question. I will keep an eye out for sluggishness. If I encounter none and my File Free is at 0 then I will assume that the Garbage Collection is running fine and I will not worry about it.
I am once again feeling free of needing to putz with my phone. I LOVE my bb.
Besides the bb freezing and clocking, what other simptoms should I be looking for in order to keep my mem numbers high?
right now I am at 26xxxx...thanks
I am running 4.5.81 and my file free has been dropping for the last month. Down to 7 MB yesterday. I deleted two months worth of email that had a lot of attachments and am back up to 20 MB now. I had tried rebooting and using the memory cleaner and that did nothing.
This is probably an obvious fix to you bberry experts but it was not to me until I tried it. I reset my keep mail option to only a month from forever and will delete all email with large attachments from the handheld as soon as I read them. I will still have a copy in my Outlook at work.
sounds like too much