Let's talk about Swap

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As you may have seen in the main Cydia repositories, an application has emerged that allows us to "expand" the RAM of our iPhone, and I wanted to write about this.

In the first place, the memory is not expanded, it is physically impossible, to expand the RAM you have to do it with memory modules (those boards with integrated circuits) and it cannot be done by software. Another very different thing is what these programs do.

Swap is, so to speak, a function that allows to use the secondary memory (Hard disk, the 8GB or 16Gb) as if it were a RAM, although only a small part (10-15 Mb), but this ONLY happens when RAM (main memory) is full. In other words, when the RAM is full then a small part of the hard drive is used to prevent it from “peting”.

The iPhone is programmed so that, when we have many apps open (Safari, Telephone, Mail, iPod and some more), the less important ones will be closed, or rather, those that we have not used for a long time. This is intended to speed up the use of the App that we are using and that others that are not in use are closed, thus allowing the RAM to be emptier.

However, when we have the iPhone with Jailbreak and we use things like BackGrounder we get the iPhone not to close applications and we saturate the RAM (without risk of it stopping working). So is this application good in these cases? Well, yes and no; In theory this would speed up the iPhone but in practice it does not happen for a simple reason, the hard drive is not like RAM, it is much slower (seriously, a lot) and the entire iPhone slows down.

I have had the opportunity to test these applications and I have to say that, in general, the iPhone 3G slowed me down a lot even when I only had one application open (apart from Phone and Mail). This in theory should not happen, which means that it may not be very programmed.

In any case, and before the criticisms, I do not think that the 3Gs pass (since the RAM memory of this is much greater) and it may not happen to all 3Gs the same as me, however I recommend not to use these applications unless you abuse the applications in Background and almost not even then.

Post dedicated to Andrés Montes (a great one that has left us).

PS: forgive me the license to dedicate the post.


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  1.   jgrubiam said

    Sorry, Andrés, thank you for everything you have given us !!!

    Good post, it is good to learn new things, especially for people who start in this world.

    A greeting.

  2.   explosive said

    learning new things is appreciated, I don't know how much ram the iphone / ipod has: S

    PS: DEP Andres Montes, he gave life to the games and because life can be wonderful

  3.   chinolee said

    I have a 3gs and a 3G, my experience with the former was good, a lot of free RAM and zero slowdowns, it may be because of the amount of RAM.
    On the other hand, 3G is not going well. It hangs quite a bit. Most likely you will uninstall it. I will continue testing.
    Now I let you know that my wife is about to give birth to my first child. Greetings.

  4.   fastorro said

    Very well explained, I suppose that this SWAP application uses a lot of RAM, perhaps it is not well programmed, or as well as a crack can come up with, but I suppose that this application will make those apps and games not close due to lack of memory ... I would use it on an iphone reloaded with apps with open msn for example.

    It is tested, if the iphone goes bad and it does not compensate as it is removed. Apple filters serve among other things to ensure the proper functioning of the iPhone, so what is in cydia can leave you the iPhone tronchomovil hehe

    PS: GREAT ANDRES MONTES! great their nicknames!

  5.   accma said

    The same thing happened on my 3G, it worked worse with iPhoneVM so I deleted it. He's a fool-cheater.

  6.   accma said

    By the way, Big Andrés! D.E.P

  7.   Alberto said

    Personally, I had it installed for a while and, although I was afraid of massacring the internal memory too much due to the continuous writing processes carried out by the swap, at first everything seemed wonderful.

    Despite not using Backgrounder it seemed at first that everything was wonders and flowers, but then I gave myself time that took much longer to start up due to having to create the swap at the beginning (I suppose), the closing of applications was not carried out (although not I had Backgrounder, Cydia was left open to me), which did not free memory and had to pull Swap even when it should not be necessary, so I think it is not worth it.

    If it is true that for someone who uses Backgrounder it seems a very good idea. For example, downloading a file with the Safari plugin from the Download Manager while updating the Cydia repos and others, but I don't know if it compensates (at least not for me) ...

    Personally I am left with freeing unnecessary daemons and others to free up some memory and speed up 3G

  8.   George said

    I use the application and I have never had problems, the performance of my iPhone 3G is more, I never managed to play one of the games that I downloaded because it simply took forever to load it, since I installed this application I can open the game without any problem , in my case if it works for me.

  9.   rain said

    There are several background errors. Operating systems do not use swap memory when RAM always runs out, Linux does so but not windows. It depends on the system, I don't know how iphone os does it. On the other hand, effectively paging and virtual memory access is slower when being on the hard disk (paging is normally in RAM), but you forget that the iphone does not have a hard disk, and that the memory access speed flash is quite older.

  10.   lolleidata said

    Forgive my ignorance but it seems to me that you are talking about an application and you do not give the name.

    Can you tell what it is?

    Thank you!