Enabling swap partition for more RAM? Zt-180 Zenpad Orphan M-16

ayman07

Member
Aug 3, 2010
25
0
As Zenpad owners might already know, the tablet lacks a few things, one being sufficient amount of RAM. 256mb just doesn't cut it these days with android. There are two application on the market that can enable swap. The catch is the devices kernel needs to be able to handle swap. So my question is, does the kernel on the Zenpad and other devices alike support swap out the box? One of the application always force closes when I try to enable swap while the other just seems to hang when trying to create a swap partition. I don't want to go through the trouble of manually creating a swap partition if the kernel doesn't even support it. Please let me know.

Sent from my Zenpad 4

Update:

With one of the apps, Swapper, I was able to successfully create a swap "partition" (more like a file) but it will not enable. So I am guessing the answer to my question is no. Anyone else with more experience look into this yet?
 

xaueious

Administrator
Staff member
Jul 9, 2010
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436
It's a bad idea.

Plain swap is one of the worst things you can do to an Android device.
 

ayman07

Member
Aug 3, 2010
25
0
Even for a backup purposes? What if you have a nice class 6 SD card? It might be worth a try. I had it done on my mytouch 3g and I didn't notice any slowdowns.

Sent from my Nexus One using Tapatalk
 

tipstir

Senior Member
Developer
Aug 4, 2010
1,505
110
So are you maxing out of the main RAM? Reduce that fancy background or live wallpaper. Just go with a solid colors black is the best. Face these devices only have 128 or 256MB for RAM the Storage external 16GB of 32GB. If the they could use part of the external storage as buffer to speed up access like Windows 7 does with ReadyBoost. I was using that feature on desktop and netbooks but best not to use it.
 
Last edited:

ZilverZurfarn

Member
May 3, 2010
133
8
Well, I run my Android phone with "real" (swap partition) swap at times (manually enabled) and feel like the OS becomes a little more responsive with swap than without (however, compcache does the reverese - Probably as my old G1 doesn't have the CPU horsepower to compress/decompress the data written to the compressed cache).
The aPad flavor of Android 1.5 also use swap OOTB. So - Under certain circumstances, swap might be a good idea I guess.
 

xaueious

Administrator
Staff member
Jul 9, 2010
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436
The Rockchip based Apad only has swap because Android's memory management driver was never implemented under kernel 2.6.25. Rockchip worked around this by adding swap, but this also meant that the use of task killers became crucial because Android was not killing tasks like it was supposed to. I'm not a programmer, but that's just my interpretation.

I used to have a G1. A compcache of about 24MB is all you need for most ROMs. Some ROMs take up so much RAM that it was necessary for the G1 to have that extra headroom, but traditional swap is one of the worst ways to achieve this. Compcache is much better than swap on the SD card or internally. There's also flash wear issues with swap. If you run a logcat, you will see that Android tries to kill tasks when available RAM drops below a certain figure threshold. If there's swap, instead of killing the task, it moves it to swap instead of killing it, which is a time consuming process. The only case where you want to use swap is if you don't want a background app or service killed.
 
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