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I have a WearOS watch which is a frustratingly janky piece of crap. Whenever you try to do anything on it, it freezes for several seconds. Why? because it's SWAPPING! what the what?! 1.9G of virtual memory for a daemon on a wristwatch? 21 java apps, each with >760M vmem? JFC

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FFS why would you even have swap on a realtime mobile device???!? AIUI the OS is already designed to kill and restart junk that uses too much memory, so just let it do its thing...

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There's usually zram, not any actual swap on storage. It's still considered swap by the kernel. It's partly there to trigger kernel memory pressure mechanisms.

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If there's actually real swap, that's insane. Android isn't designed to work with swap. It's supposed to run out of memory and trigger the userspace OOM killer implementation to kill inactive apps. It gets apps to save snapshots of state as soon as they become inactive.

8:27 PM · Oct 27, 2020Twitter Web App

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Ahhh, so half the 1GB of RAM is partitioned into zram for swap? That makes a crazy sort of sense, but the performance is still awful.

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You'd need to check to figure out how the device is set up. Android devices do usually have a fair bit of zram. It has to be properly tuned for the device. It seems like this device may have way too much zram, and perhaps has it configured quite badly, especially for a weak CPU.

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