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androidiosmemoryair
Nathan
Nathan

Reputation: 41

Android/iOS app memory limit (clarification) & Adobe Air

I have been searching these forums for an idea on memory limits imposed to applications created with the flex SDK and running in Android / iOS. I have looked into the following posts here:

From what I understand there is an up to 32MB limit on applications, however running an Adobe Air app on Android was granting me a lot more than 32MB. I am quite confused regarding these notions of RAM, heap and "ROM". Aren't all those the same? Basically, what I would like to know is how much "RAM" can a process really access?

From my test on Android, I assumed that it was a sum of the following items:

I have also made some tests on iOS (app packaged using the flex SDK) and it seems that on an iPad (256MB of RAM), the application crashes after getting about 150 MB of RAM.

I would be grateful if someone could provide me some clarifications, I am mainly looking for answers to fhe following questions:

  1. On Android, is this 16, 24, 32MB limit per application still in place?
  2. If it is, then does anyone know if the Air runtime is using C code to access more RAM? (I will check this on the Adobe forums as well).
  3. If the limit is not in place or I misunderstood it, what is the actual maximum amount of "RAM" a process can access, is it the sum of the element I mentioned above or is there some other formula?
  4. Does anyone know of the restrictions on the iOS platform (max amount of RAM per app)?

Thanks.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 4839

Answers (2)

RelativeGames
RelativeGames

Reputation: 1593

I have an iOS game based on C++ that on occasion gets to use too much of my iPad 1's 256MB of RAM and it gets stopped by the OS. So the limit on iOS is basically OS + app ( an estimated 160MB ). Gotta mention I kinda stop other apps when I run it though so there's nothing else running in the background.

Upvotes: 0

idok
idok

Reputation: 652

Yes, the limit on memory for each app still holds good. In android every application has its own VM instance and hence its own heap memory(which is not shared with other apps) of certain fixed size. The size of heap memory allocated to the application is set by the manufacturer and thus varies from mobile to mobile and is anywhere between 16MB and 64MB depending on the device. The heap size for a particular application can be doubled by including android:largeHeap="true" in the manifest file attribute ( though it is strongly discouraged you do that). So I assume 'Adobe Air' app does that.

When you close an app, android doesn't really kill it. The app runs in background, so that it could be loaded quickly the next time you open it. So, only a portion of ur device's RAM is allotted to every application and hence the hard-limit on every application.

I have no clue about iOS though!

Upvotes: 4

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