Why didn't my Application crash after it used more memory than VM budget?

Question

I was running my app on Nexus S, the per-app memory limit on which is 32M bytes.

I ran the command to check the memory usage of the app:

adb -d shell dumpsys meminfo com.mycomp.myapp

Applications Memory Usage (kB):
Uptime: 1128469 Realtime: 1128466

** MEMINFO in pid 841 [com.mycomp.myapp] **
                native   dalvik    other    total
        size:    29148     9415      N/A    38563
   allocated:    20259     6273      N/A    26532
        free:      379     3142      N/A     3521
       (Pss):     9253     2049    25338    36640
(shared dirty):     1984     1520     7836    11340
(priv dirty):     9180      960    16212    26352

Objects
       Views:        0        ViewRoots:        0
 AppContexts:        0       Activities:        0
      Assets:       24    AssetManagers:       24
 Local Binders:       11    Proxy Binders:       23
 Death Recipients:        1
 OpenSSL Sockets:        0

SQL
           heap:      173         MEMORY_USED:      173
 PAGECACHE_OVERFLOW:       28         MALLOC_SIZE:       50

 DATABASES
  pgsz     dbsz   Lookaside(b)  Dbname
     1       14             61  webview.db
     1        8             53  webviewCache.db

From the memory report above, my app already used 38563K memory, which has already exceeded 32M VM budget. But why hasn't the app crashed yet?

Answer 1

Look at the 'allocated' row, it is under the 32M limit.