As I'm sure some of you have seen, there are now some apps coming out that are starting to mimic some of MeterBerry's functionality. This thread is NOT a knock on those applications. They look great and I honestly congratulate the developers.
But I do want to clear up some questions that have come up due to these new apps about MeterBerry and memory/battery usage. As is mentioned in MeterBerry's forum thread (see my signature), MeterBerry is about 150 KB in size. I have heard people say that an app of this size:
a) Wastes memory, and it's foolish to waste memory while monitoring memory.
b) Wastes battery life.
This is simply not true, and is just clever marketing. Let me explain:
There is a very big difference between the installation footprint and the runtime footprint of an application. The installation footprint of an application is how much space it takes up in the application block when it is installed. The runtime footprint of an application is how much application memory it consumes while running after your device has started up.
Just because MeterBerry is ~150KB in size doesn't mean it is "wasting 150 KB" when it runs. That is nonsense. And its size doesn't automatically mean it consumes a lot of battery life. Let me explain:
1. ~100 KB of MeterBerry is its icon files. These icons are data-only, and do not have any affect whatsoever on your free application memory after the device starts up.
2. MeterBerry's logs are not stored in application memory, and are instead stored in persistent memory on the internal device memory. So, like the icon files, the logs do not have any affect whatsoever on application memory after startup.
3. MeterBerry has VERY small runtime footprint. I am an embedded software engineer with years of experience developing safety-critical software for military helicopters and jets. I wrote MeterBerry at night and over the weekends because I love Blackberries. MeterBerry has been exhaustively optimized to ensure that any application memory it uses while running is recovered by the Java garbage collector. MeterBerry does what it needs to do, marks the memory it used as no longer needed so it will be recovered, and gets out. It doesn't "leak" memory.
4. Because of its small runtime footprint, MeterBerry's affect on battery life is negligible. An application's installation footprint has nothing to do with its affect on battery life, only its runtime footprint does.
Again, it is easy to make a sweeping statement after looking at all of MeterBerry's functionality and its file size that it must use a lot of memory and battery, but this is truly not the case. I hope that everyone can appreciate and understand this.
As usual, if you have any questions please feel free to e-mail me at
[email protected].