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I have a rooted OG Droid which I install custom ROMs to frequently. I've noticed in all builds of Froyo and Gingerbread that I've tried, over time of being on, certain services will take up more RAM and spawn new processes.

Specifically I've noticed that Google Services does this consistently. Initially it'll take maybe 7MB of RAM and only have 1 process (com.google.process.gapps). But after a good 10+ hours it'll spawn Android Core Apps (android.process.acore) and Calendar Storage (com.android.providers.calendar). Currently it's sitting at 21MB of usage.

This memory is never reclaimed and the phone will bog down as the internal Android task killer has to kill tasks more frequently. I eventually have to reboot.

Why does this happen and can I fix it?

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  • Good question. I've noticed a slow creep in memory usage but it hasn't been a problem on my Vibrant.
    – Matthew Read
    Commented May 18, 2011 at 1:22
  • Yeah it's very much a big problem on the OG Droid which only has 256MB RAM
    – SAGExSDX
    Commented May 18, 2011 at 12:38

1 Answer 1

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The additional processes are created on demand (e.g. if you open the calendar). The increasing memory consumption comes from the fact the Java is not able to release (heap) memory back to the system. That's why google has implemented the ActivityManager, which from time to time kills the whole process only to restart it later with a lower memory footprint. That is exactly what the task killer app try to do, which is kind of redundant.

The ActivityManger does it's job pretty good on my Galaxy S with only 329 MB RAM available to the system. I never needed no task killer. But, this is only a workaround for resource constrained devices like smartphones. Current high-end android devices have up to 1GB of memory or more, so that the ActivityManger will become more and more out of work.

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  • Yeah but the problem is that the Android task killer is not killing the ever-growing processes like com.google.process.gapps and com.android.providers.calendar
    – SAGExSDX
    Commented Aug 31, 2011 at 2:22
  • @SAGExSDX How do you know that the Android task killer is not killing these processes? Isn't it possible that they need the resources from the beginning? But there is of course the possibility that they are whitelisted by the system and then there is sure a good reason why this is done.
    – Flow
    Commented Sep 1, 2011 at 10:11

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