It's all forced out! Android 4.4 Kat requires only 512MB of RAM to run smoothly without pressure

Android 4.4 Kat boasts at least 512MB of system memory to run smoothly, to some extent, but also to do so, compared to many of the previous promises are really surprising, then, Google is how to do it?

It's interesting to say. Since its development, Android has matured in functionality, and Google has shifted to other areas in the 4.x era. Jelly Bean 4.1, Google proposed the "Butter Project" (Project Butter) to make the Android system faster, more reliable, and less crashing.

With this phased goal in hand, Google has proposed a new "Slim Project" (Project svelte) to reduce Android's memory footprint and ensure that any manufacturer's phones can perform any function with 512MB of memory, without having to confine themselves to the old gingerbread 2.3 System, the final result is Kat 4.4.

Android Chief Engineer Dave Burke joked: "The first thing I do is ' butter engineering ' to make the system smoother." The problem is that butter has weight. Next, ' Slim Engineering ' is about losing weight. So so far, my contribution to Android is basically zero. ”

So how does this subtraction work? Thanks to Nexus 4.

"The basic goal of ' slim engineering ' is to reduce memory requirements to 512MB," Burke said. How do we do that? Take a Nexus 4 and let it run on 512MB (originally 2GB). ”

The next step is to have Kat run at a lower resolution and a two processor core. To give engineers a more immersive experience, they were forced to use a compact version of Nexus 4, with memory, resolution, processor core, and frequency drastically reduced.

"We chose the QHD resolution, which is 960x540, because this is the dessert for the entry-level smartphone," Burke said. We reduced the processor core from four to two. We lowered the frequency of the operation, and all that sort of thing. Let's just say that a bunch of us are using crippled phones. It's painful. ”

At this point, Google has four goals:

1. Simplify the volume of the system.

2, reduce the use of Google experience devices (that is, the Nexus series) of the memory footprint.

3, fixed memory less when the application interaction, crash.

4, to better monitor the operational status of the application, so that developers can better control the application of memory footprint. This is called "procstats" (process state) and is a feature in development patterns.

The first two were done with the crippled version of Nexus 4, and the last two allowed Android to better monitor and process the application's memory usage, such as once you find out who uses a lot of memory for a long time, and the system shuts it down automatically.

In the end, Android 4.4 is slim enough to run more smoothly on a low configuration platform, without losing functionality and adding a lot of new stuff.

Of course, pay attention to the premise of the second article, that is limited to Nexus equipment. In other words, for the third Fang Andro device, Google is still largely powerless, especially if it is pre-installed with a lot of apps, and Android's own efforts are in vain.