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Based on available evidence so far, are there legitimate concerns that people with older phones that have 512MB memory (e.g. Droid X) would experience memory issues when running 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) based ROMs?

To be more specific:

If my stock Froyo 2.2 ROM boots up with ~170MB memory free, and during my day to day use I end up with ~50-70MB memory free (this is with ALL my actively used apps loaded, and Android not killing any of them to make room for others), what would the expected memory footprint be on an AOSP based ICS ROM?

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If there is a ICS ROM available for the Droid X, it should run on a device with 512MB. The minimum requirements for ICS specified by CyanogenMod team is 256MB and a "decent GPU". I am not sure what kind of GPU the Droid X has, but you will probably have a better experience with Gingerbread then ICS on that device if the GPU isn't that great. My brother had that device and complained constantly about lag and lock up. If you have the "stock" MOTOBLUR, you will probably have a better experience just by installing any AOSP based ROM.

You can expect the footprint to be about the same, maybe a bit less, then what you see now. This is because the android OS will always try to use as much memory as possible in order to try and keep your experience better. If the application is in memory you can switch back to it faster then if it has to reload the entire application, plus it can "remember where you were".

As a side note, I don't currently see any CyanogenMod 9 builds available on the CM forums for the Droid X, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any, I just don't see them.

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  • GPU: PowerVR SGX530. Is that enough for ICS?
    – DVK
    Feb 7, 2012 at 21:27
  • Re: CM9 - not sure. I know CM7.1 had some nightlies for DX. One reason I'm asking is to know if I should sink the time into Gingerbread or wait till CM9 has DX support
    – DVK
    Feb 7, 2012 at 21:29
  • CM9 is still in "nightlies", there is not an "official" release for any device, AFAIK. Even at that, who know how long (or ever) before the DX is supported. I think you will like AOSP android over BLUR, now its just how long you want to wait for CM9, or go with CM7. Usually the upgrade path from one CM build to another is fairly simple, so if you have CM7, going to CM9 should be easy.
    – Ryan Conrad
    Feb 7, 2012 at 22:43
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There shouldn't be any problems, since my Bravo (HTC Desire) runs ICS insanely quick (also 512Mb).

After a day on AOSP ICS (everluv), without any task-killing (but with a 6 background-task limitation), I still have 176Mb free, and that's roughly what you can expect in these conditions. Without background-task limitation, there is still 90Mb free.*

btw: http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=691

This is the first place to look for ICS roms. However, don't expect to much, because drivers and hardware acceleration are not optimized for hardware like yours/mine.

  • checked with htop command
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