New PlayBook Trick To Free Up Memory...

i came across this trick while seeing how many apps i could open before crashing my playbook in response to a thread about oipad vs pb,,, i was able to open 10 (ten) apps & still have 60MB of ram left,,, after closing all apps i noticed an increase of 50 (yup, i said FIFTY) MB of RAM,,, i'm normally @ 625-627 after a fresh boot,,, after doing this twice, to be sure, i had 680 MB,,, not sure but i'm thinking the playbook closes some things in the background to gain RAM to keep from crashing,,, this gain is consistent & there is nothing but the usual loss of RAM over the course of a couple days, (10-20 MB),,, the pb is also noticably snappier...

Just tried. Didnt. Crash the pb. Just started closing the oldest apps. Noticed no memory increase. Did you do a reboot after closing the apps?

Originally Posted by CDM76

Just tried. Didnt. Crash the pb. Just started closing the oldest apps. Noticed no memory increase. Did you do a reboot after closing the apps?

nope,,, just "x-ed" out of them, 1 by 1, newest to first,,, i.e. in reverse order, right to left, all were minimized,,, i did have the playbook in showcase mode so that all apps ran in background...

after reboot, my memory went back to 625MB,,, repeated the steps above & regained the 50MB again,,, i've done this 3 times so far, always w/ the same result...

That has been true for a while. That is what possessed me to ask for a Memory Eating application ages ago when Android apps would crash but you could not launch a new one. If you opened up enough apps to eat/grab memory, finally the Android player would reinitialize and you could run another Android app. There were a few memory eaters, Kermed created the one I still have. But in one of the OS upgrades, rim fixed it - probably when they gave us the ability to run more than one at a time.

i'm just surprised it kept the newfound memory without going back to reboot amount...

When you open apps until they crash you will find that it restarts the Android player thus freeing up more memory. Android player usually takes about a minute or so to boot back up.

Originally Posted by BB-Bmore

When you open apps until they crash you will find that it restarts the Android player thus freeing up more memory. Android player usually takes about a minute or so to boot back up.

to be clear,,, DON'T open apps until it crashes,,, i ONLY opened 10 (this may be less for you, depending on the demands of the particular apps you open) until there was 50-60 MB of memory left then closed them 1 by 1 in the reverse order i opened them, i.e. last to 1st, right to left,,, the memory is there once you close all apps, not a minute later,,, question: if there are no sideloaded or ported apps, is the andriod player still installed,,, i have no sideloads or ports,,,

Android Player is installed regardless of if there are ported/sideloaded apps installed onto the PlayBook. It's baked into the OS itself [has been since OS2.0], so no way to remove it.