Do I need to clean the RAM on an Android smartphone

Every Android user, sooner or later, is faced with filling up the RAM of a smartphone or tablet. Many solve the problem by installing special applications, the so-called task killers, which forcibly clean up background processes. Let’s see how justified such actions are, and whether it is necessary to clean the RAM at all.

What is RAM

First, some technical details. In a smartphone, as in any computer, there are several types of memory. They have different speeds and are used for different purposes. For example, the internal memory, where you store files and where you install applications, does not work very fast, but retains information if the smartphone is turned off or is discharged.

RAM (Random Access Memory), aka random access memory, works fast, but “forgets” everything if the phone is turned off. It can be called a kind of «desktop» on which information is stored while the smartphone is working.

How much RAM do you need?

Modern flagships tend to have between 4GB and 8GB of RAM. As practice shows, 4 GB is enough for most tasks. Perhaps only the heaviest and most resource-intensive games may need 6 GB or more.

If we talk about the lower limit, then the minimum amount of RAM with which it is comfortable to use a smartphone is 2 GB. At 1 GB, many applications begin to noticeably slow down.

RAM is full. What to do?

The simple answer is nothing.

As you run various applications, RAM will fill up. Eventually it will fill up almost completely. In this case, to launch new applications, you will need to close some of the already running processes. But you don’t need to do it manually. The Android system itself knows how much memory to clear and which processes to close.

The very idea that the RAM of a smartphone needs to be cleaned manually with the help of some kind of task killers is a mistake. The Android system has its roots in Linux and Unix. And from the point of view of the Linux system kernel, empty memory is useless memory.

The system kernel already has a built-in task killer called OOM (out of memory). Unlike third-party applications, OOM is delicate and only unloads user applications when the system encounters a real shortage of RAM.

What about saving energy?

Battery consumption has nothing to do with the actual occupancy of the RAM. RAM practically does not consume battery power to store any data. But she actively spends energy on the process of reading and writing. From this point of view, third-party task killers only harm.

Suppose you are on the Internet. Then someone called you and you stopped talking. After ending the call, you found that the smartphone’s RAM is full and manually cleared it using a task killer. Thus, you simply closed the browser and all the tabs that were open in it. Now, when you launch the browser again, it is forced to reload itself and open pages. This consumes your traffic and battery power.

If you care about saving energy, you need to fight not with applications in the smartphone’s RAM, but with applications that drain the battery the most. And these are not necessarily the same programs. You can see which applications are the most active in battery consumption in the settings in the “Battery” section.

As for RAM, just let it live its own life. Android is no fool and knows how to manage it.