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Low RAM issue

F

foxnews1

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 16, 2010
384
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seen so many reporting low RAM, I did a little test my self. I open four sites: engadget, macrumors, Gizmodo, and yahoo. Switching between these pages caused the page to be reloaded, very annoying. I ran pad Info, and it showed only 10MB of RAM free.


so much hype on the powerful A4 but low in RAM:mad: It is like put a powerful truck engine into a Corola and can carry only 5 people.
Others said that why would we care about RAM as long as ipad runs smooth? Well, it is not smooth. reloading page very time you switch tab/page is very annoying.

what about the coming OS 4 with multitask? with this low RAM, how many app can run concurrently before they crash?

that is why we care about RAM.
 
foxnews1 said:
seen so many reporting low RAM, I did a little test my self. I open four sites: engadget, macrumors, Gizmodo, and yahoo. Switching between these pages caused the page to be reloaded, very annoying. I ran pad Info, and it showed only 10MB of RAM free.


so much hype on the powerful A4 but low in RAM:mad: It is like put a powerful truck engine into a Corola and can carry only 5 people.
Others said that why would we care about RAM as long as ipad runs smooth? Well, it is not smooth. reloading page very time you switch tab/page is very annoying.

what about the coming OS 4 with multitask? with this low RAM, how many app can run concurrently before they crash?

that is why we care about RAM.
Click to expand...

I completely agree. If I had one compllaint about the device at this point it would be this. It really makes absolutely no sense to me. Why would Apple be SO cheap about it? How much more would it really cost to have put 512mb in this thing? It clearly would have improved the browsing experience.

Oh well. It's not like the device is unpleasant to use, but having 512mb just seems so logical it annoys me that it doesn't have it.
 
I have 6 browsers open with a song playing in the background. No performance issues at all.

And switching between pages DOES NOT reload the page.

You and your anti iPad propaganda.
 
I just opened those four windows in four tabs on safari on my backbook pro, and they used 218-230 megs or so including safari. Considering the overhead MIGHT be less on the iPad, that is still a decent chunk given the iPad has 256 megs of memory in it.
 
Mine is just fine, I can have 5 browsers open with music playing and also emails coming in and my iPad doesn't slow down one bit.
 
pvmacguy said:
Mine is just fine, I can have 5 browsers open with music playing and also emails coming in and my iPad doesn't slow down one bit.
Click to expand...

This isn't about slowdown. It's about the having to reload web pages each time you go back to them because the device can only keep so much in it's limited memory at one time.
 
Fakejohnsculley said:
I have 6 browsers open with a song playing in the background. No performance issues at all.

And switching between pages DOES NOT reload the page.

You and your anti iPad propaganda.
Click to expand...

As I mentioned, many reported this issue, not just me. Do a search and you will find more than a few threads that mentioned about this.
 
Would it be possible to solder in more ram with bigger modules and ditch the smaller ones? Doubt it I'm sure
 
troop231 said:
Would it be possible to solder in more ram with bigger modules and ditch the smaller ones? Doubt it I'm sure
Click to expand...

based on Apple business model, the only way to upgrade is to add this item to your wish list for the next ipad purchase V2 2011.
 
I did the same thing on firefox on my mbp, brand new opening and it is using 235 megs for those four sites.

I closed down the engadget and gizmodo tabs on safari and its footprint went down from 218-230 megs down to ~167 megs.

Closing down engadget and gizmodo in firefox and it drops from the 235 megs listed above to 187 megs.

So you are seeing around 50 megs for those two websites when loaded.

After closing mac rumors also in both safari and firefox, I am left with just a yahoo tab.

Safari is using 138 megs, and Firefox 160 megs.

I would say this has been an issue for a while, in that website developers suffer from the same disease as programmers. Efficiency is no longer a concern. Before broadband become prevelant web designers actually tried to make sure their sites were as efficient as possible. Now it doesn't matter.

Take those 3 tabs on my mbp and between engadget, gizmodo and macrumors they used up 85megs to 90megs of ram.

Without knowing what else is going on can't say why it would cause a reload unless there is a potential bug or memory is being held in use by something else in the device.
 
According to pad info I only have a total of 128mb of ram so either the developer sucks at math or apple is fooling us.

And comparing this mobile safari to the desktop versions memory footprint is just stupid-- desktop safari has a LOT more features that require more memory. Mobile safari is designed for low memory usage.

That beings said-- I'm also having problems with tabs reloading too much.
 
marksman said:
I did the same thing on firefox on my mbp, brand new opening and it is using 235 megs for those four sites.

I closed down the engadget and gizmodo tabs on safari and its footprint went down from 218-230 megs down to ~167 megs.

Closing down engadget and gizmodo in firefox and it drops from the 235 megs listed above to 187 megs.

So you are seeing around 50 megs for those two websites when loaded.

After closing mac rumors also in both safari and firefox, I am left with just a yahoo tab.

Safari is using 138 megs, and Firefox 160 megs.

I would say this has been an issue for a while, in that website developers suffer from the same disease as programmers. Efficiency is no longer a concern. Before broadband become prevelant web designers actually tried to make sure their sites were as efficient as possible. Now it doesn't matter.

Take those 3 tabs on my mbp and between engadget, gizmodo and macrumors they used up 85megs to 90megs of ram.

Without knowing what else is going on can't say why it would cause a reload unless there is a potential bug or memory is being held in use by something else in the device.
Click to expand...


thanks for doing a detail test to confirm.

ipad Safari offers 9 tabs/pages. I hope that apple tested and loaded all 9 pages. but then reloading was not an issue for them. For heavy web user like us, not only it slows down your view, it takes bandwidth and increases data usage.
 
I've only got this and msn open and its reloading each time. I'm not even listening to music!!
 
I loaded these 4 sites on my ipad, and open one more msn.com home page, no reloading when swithing.
You might have something running in background or some bad process etc, try a reboot and test it again.


foxnews1 said:
seen so many reporting low RAM, I did a little test my self. I open four sites: engadget, macrumors, Gizmodo, and yahoo. Switching between these pages caused the page to be reloaded, very annoying. I ran pad Info, and it showed only 10MB of RAM free.


so much hype on the powerful A4 but low in RAM:mad: It is like put a powerful truck engine into a Corola and can carry only 5 people.
Others said that why would we care about RAM as long as ipad runs smooth? Well, it is not smooth. reloading page very time you switch tab/page is very annoying.

what about the coming OS 4 with multitask? with this low RAM, how many app can run concurrently before they crash?

that is why we care about RAM.
Click to expand...
 
Skandocious said:
According to pad info I only have a total of 128mb of ram so either the developer sucks at math or apple is fooling us.

And comparing this mobile safari to the desktop versions memory footprint is just stupid-- desktop safari has a LOT more features that require more memory. Mobile safari is designed for low memory usage.

That beings said-- I'm also having problems with tabs reloading too much.
Click to expand...

Half of the 256MB might be allocated for video. Is that possible? The PS3 does that. 256MB for video on top of the RAM for the actual game play.Having said that, hardly anything could run on 128MB.
 
I have been using my iPad pretty solid since I got it.

This is such a non-issue.

Surfing is fine, bigger pages tend to reload, but safari seems to start fetching them when you go to the window switching section, so by the time you select a page it is already partially loading.

If anything, I am delightfully surprised at the performance. Having owned a few UMPC's where it takes a minute or more to load a web page (with a full OS and 2 GB of memory!), I don't really care how much memory it has, as long as it is speedy.

Switching between apps on my iPad is at least 10X faster than Alt-Tabbing on my samsung Q1 UMPC. Again, with a full OS (Vista) and laptop grade processor, 2 gb of memory running full desktop apps.
 
this reloading issue defeats the main benefit of having multiple tabs/pages.

if it reloads everytime, then I don't need multiple tabs. just open one when I need.
 
Opera will solve this

Hopefully the Opera browser with the server based optimization will get approved. That will run much smoother with the limited RAM.
 
foxnews1 said:
It is like put a powerful truck engine into a Corola and can carry only 5 people.
Click to expand...
Powerful engine and low payload capability? They're called sports cars. ;)

As an Audi fan, it's amusing they call the chip "A4".

foxnews1 said:
For heavy web user like us, not only it slows down your view, it takes bandwidth and increases data usage.
Click to expand...
What kind of bandwidth or usage constraints are you facing? All you'd need to do is close a tab or two and it would resolve the reloading. Surely you don't need all 4 tabs open at the same time. If you need that much web, your bandwidth issues are a bigger problem than the lack of RAM I would think.
 
ijen0311 said:
Just did a hard reset and it still happens. Odd.
Click to expand...

Is it some HTML5 stuff? Or Flash? They are pretty content-rich sites. Try the sites that Apple claims are 'iPad-ready'. There are a few. Does the same thing happen?
 
kernkraft said:
Is it some HTML5 stuff? Or Flash? They are pretty content-rich sites. Try the sites that Apple claims are 'iPad-ready'. There are a few. Does the same thing happen?
Click to expand...

Thumbs up. Espn and CNN both open without reloading. Phew! Thank you! :D
 
diabolic said:
I just opened Engadget and Gizmodo in addition to the others and I can move back and forth between all 5 and none need to reload. You are saying you can't do that.
Click to expand...

That's what was happening. It must have just been the sites I was on. It works fine on iPad friendlies.
 
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