Virtual RAM explained: What's the hype about (2024)

FAQs

Virtual RAM explained: What's the hype about? ›

A phone with 8GB RAM will be more efficient and fast than a device with 6GB RAM + 4GB of virtual RAM. The primary purpose of having virtual RAM is to make memory management better. With apps and games increasing in size, having virtual RAM will help your phone to keep more apps open on the RAM.

As a result, using too many applications and processes simultaneously overloads the RAM, leading to the handset slowing down or crashing. What is virtual RAM? Virtual RAM is a feature on some Android smartphones that uses a portion of the device's internal storage to temporarily act as additional RAM.

Unlike the zRAM, virtual RAM is not part of the physical RAM module and uses a section of the phone's storage to store low-priority processes. It is like a small section of the stock room used to store products, like salads, that are in low demand or sell only during a specific time of the day.

Virtual memory enables data that is in RAM and not currently being used to be transferred to the hard disk. This frees up room in RAM for other programs and data. When the data on the hard disk is needed again, any other unused data is transferred to the hard disk before the original data is transferred back to RAM.

RAM Plus is a feature on your Galaxy phone that provides intelligent memory expansion by using your storage as virtual memory. With more memory, you can have more apps open in the background and launch apps faster.

If you don't have enough RAM on your PC, disabling it might increase the frequency of memory-related errors, but at least you might increase your SSD's life span because that's one less file being written on it. Personally, I don't see the need to disable it.

Virtual RAM is very very slow compared to RAM so it's used to store memory from programs running in the background. You're opening yourself up to having a ton of open apps on your phone that may drastically hurt your battery life.

Is Virtual RAM good for gaming? Virtual RAM expansion on Android will not boost up your gaming performance directly. Yes, it will help you to keep a few of your applications running in the background, as the extra bit of RAM will take over some of the duties of regular RAM.

If virtual memory doesn't exist, we can't load more than one program in the main memory. This means that without virtual memory, we can only run one program at a time. This is because each program might have to use different functions that may point to the same addresses in RAM.

It has been observed that virtual memory operates at much slower speeds than computer RAM. If the OS juggles data between virtual memory and RAM continuously, it can slow down the computer considerably. This can lead to a phenomenon called 'thrashing.

How efficient is Virtual RAM? ›

The truth about virtual RAM

Virtual RAM stored on your device's storage is significantly slower than the dedicated physical RAM. When your device relies heavily on virtual RAM, you may notice a slowdown in performance, especially when switching between apps or performing memory-intensive tasks.