Is memory extension actually bad?

[Spookie]

I read a lot of posts about the memory extension being a gimmick and that it eats battery, slows down the phone and does nothing good. Is that actually true?

 

[4fun20]

hi, i'm interested in this too.

edit: it seems to be a valid claim.
after reading your post i disabled memory extension and i immediately noticed that widgets like google news is way more responsive.
i have to look deeper into it over the next days.

 

[mik101]

It's one of those things that may help in certain circumstances, but generally, and I would say for most users, it only has a negative effect if you have enough RAM, and your storage is fast enough -- somewhat like the page file on windows if you have a significant amount of ram, and a fast enough SSD.
The other negative is the thrashing of your storage, potentially making it wear out faster. Yes that is a long term problem, but I have run into it on a Redmi Note 5 Pro because I use my phones for many years, with frequent rom changes/upgrades. My wife and I always buy the same phone, because it makes it easy to support hers. Her flash memory ended up wearing out and it caused random crashes when the bad blocks were hit. Her model had less memory and storage than mine, so the smaller amount of flash memory was being rewritten much more frequently. Some of this is speculation, but the failure was repeatable using nand benchmarks, and CPU temps were fine, so that helped point me to that conclusion. Do note we also had those phones for 4 years though.

 

[4fun20]

It's one of those things that may help in certain circumstances, but generally, and I would say for most users, it only has a negative effect if you have enough RAM, and your storage is fast enough -- somewhat like the page file on windows if you have a significant amount of ram, and a fast enough SSD.
The other negative is the thrashing of your storage, potentially making it wear out faster. Yes that is a long term problem, but I have run into it on a Redmi Note 5 Pro because I use my phones for many years, with frequent rom changes/upgrades. My wife and I always buy the same phone, because it makes it easy to support hers. Her flash memory ended up wearing out and it caused random crashes when the bad blocks were hit. Her model had less memory and storage than mine, so the smaller amount of flash memory was being rewritten much more frequently. Some of this is speculation, but the failure was repeatable using nand benchmarks, and CPU temps were fine, so that helped point me to that conclusion. Do note we also had those phones for 4 years though.

I'm running the Xiaomi 13 with A13 and MIUI 14, which, in my case, never use more that 4 of it's 8gb RAM.
for me it absolutely makes sense to disable the memory extension.

 

[Spookie]

I'm running the Xiaomi 13 with A13 and MIUI 14, which, in my case, never use more that 4 of it's 8gb RAM.
for me it absolutely makes sense to disable the memory extension.

Oh that's interesting. Do you close apps or just leave them be?

 

[4fun20]

Oh that's interesting. Do you close apps or just leave them be?

i close apps on a inconsistent basis (around every 2 days)

 

[Spookie]

I can't go a day without MIUI clearing them after few hours of not using them. I guess that's the price of having a budget mid range phone

 

[4fun20]

how much RAM does your phone have?

 

[Spookie]

how much RAM does your phone have?

8GB same as you but Xiaomi probably configured the system differently or they did some RAM management changes in MIUI 14 as I'm still running MIUI 13

 

[4fun20]

8GB same as you but Xiaomi probably configured the system differently or they did some RAM management changes in MIUI 14 as I'm still running MIUI 13

i am not sure what you said in the first place. Do you meant that the phone close apps by it's own or does it become slow that you have to close some of the apps manually to speed the phone up?

if the phone does it automatically.. you can set up how many apps are allowed to be running at the same time in the developer options.

 

[Spookie]

i am not sure what you said in the first place. Do you meant that the phone close apps by it's own or does it become slow that you have to close some of the apps manually to speed the phone up?

if the phone does it automatically.. you can set up how many apps are allowed to be running at the same time in the developer options.

I mean it allows to run as many as you want but after you do not open them for a while they are automatically closed from the recents

 

[gogocar62]

It's not a problem of lack of free RAM. This is due to the aggressive RAM management that MIUI uses. It is a tax for the fact that many users whine and pressure the manufacturer that they want a battery life of at least a week on one charge.

 

[4fun20]

8GB same as you but Xiaomi probably configured the system differently or they did some RAM management changes in MIUI 14 as I'm still running MIUI 13

i am not sure what you said in the first place. Do you meant that the phone close apps by it's own or does it become slow that you have to close some of the apps manually to speed the phone up?

if the phone does it automatically.. you can set up how many apps are allowed to be running at the same time in the developer options.

I mean it allows to run as many as you want but after you do not open them for a while they are automatically closed from the recents

check developer options for "background process limit" maybe you can increase it a bit

 

[Spookie]

i am not sure what you said in the first place. Do you meant that the phone close apps by it's own or does it become slow that you have to close some of the apps manually to speed the phone up?

if the phone does it automatically.. you can set up how many apps are allowed to be running at the same time in the developer options.

check developer options for "background process limit" maybe you can increase it a bit

Checked and it's on Standard Limit

 

[Spookie]

hi, i'm interested in this too.

edit: it seems to be a valid claim.
after reading your post i disabled memory extension and i immediately noticed that widgets like google news is way more responsive.
i have to look deeper into it over the next days.

So how did it go? In my case it feels like it's the same as turned on. So I would say memory extension is the most useless feature a smartphone company has ever implemented. But that's only my opinion.

 

[Peter Lin]

It depends. Some apps gets better performance with extension on. Some not. But it doesn't really affect battery life. I can confirm this. Even though it can get worse performance in some apps. It won't affect that much. But I still prefer turn it off.

 

[Spookie]

Well I tried both on and off and noticed that the phone feels less snappy when it's turned on. In the pictures below we can see that RAM usage is basically the same. That makes me believe that it's a gimmick, well at least for devices with 6+ GB of RAM.

 

[Eissa]

I read a lot of posts about the memory extension being a gimmick and that it eats battery, slows down the phone and does nothing good. Is that actually true?

It's not that difference you will see it will help low-end devices to get more space specially 4GB phones

 

[MiamiVice]

Hi, i have tested different solution, 0 3 and 5 ram extension with AnTuTu. Looks the pictures.

 

[Spookie]

I mean AnTuTu is not really a real world performance test but there seems to be some kind of a difference.

 

[MiamiVice]

I mean AnTuTu is not really a real world performance test but there seems to be some kind of a difference.

I trust you but haven't "real" test, we need Xiaomi expert developer to shows us the way
Anyway i think in normal use (browser, email, social, ...) seems to be going well with any options, 0 or 3 or 5.
Using games i see a little lag sometimes in 0 ram configuration.
At moment, I'm using 3ram.

 

[zyroneon]

I had to turn off mine because it causes my Poco F3 on Xiaomi.eu 14.0.6.0 stable to freeze whenever I try to use it while charging and it also makes my phone gets undetected when I plug it on my pc (even Fastboot idk why) after countless of hours trying to fix the issue that I even thought of replacing the motherboard/charging port/board, I had tried to turned the settings off and restarted my phone and voila it fixed it and my pc can also detect my phone afterwards. Maybe this the memory extension is just bad for me like an isolated case but who knows.

 

[MiamiVice]

Anyway i never detect most 3gb in use...

 

[XiNerr]

Hello. Memory extension makes my device slower specially in read/write operation of the storage. I confirmed this using the storage benchmark app CPDT. Just look at the pictures for results. With Memory extension enabled the sequential read and write operation of the storage significantly reduced by up to 70%. I repeated these benchmarks several times and I almost got consistent results. I also noticed the loading time of some games is faster when OFF. I'm using a Mi 10T pro with 8GB of RAM.
Also, turning that feature ON will cause your flash storage to wear out more quickly and reduce the operational lifetime of your flash memory.

 

[MiamiVice]

Ok I have made same test, Redmi Note 11 Pro, 0 and 5 Ram+