I lost a draft post in Voyager on Android while I was a few apps away doing research and looking for a photo to add to the post.

That brought to me an understanding that Android will just kill apps for memory purposes.

Then I thought back to Windows 98 and how it had a page file that would write RAM information to the hard disk and use it as RAM. It was slow af, but it worked.

So I'm wondering: it's 2026; why is Android just killing apps instead of writing them to a much faster drive for recall when needed?

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[–] 9 points 3 months ago (6 children)

That's a lot of read/write cycles to your storage for no real reason. Some phones do this now, though, bc android sucks with being resource heavy. They call it "16GB RAM with RAM boost" and it's usually 8GB + 8GB meaning that 2nd 8GB is like the ReadyBoost cache in Windows old days. It is using your local storage for extra RAM storage, but, again, that's a little ridiculous, personally.

My voyager will let me know my comment was recovered if I'm gone too long, so maybe that's a setting you can tweak.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Yup, it's common on chinese phone/tablet where they advertised things with 16GB of ram while it's 8+8. First thing I disabled on my first phone that supported this fake RAM. This would be slow and kill your flash.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    You wouldn't gain anything speed or durability wise from disabling swap. Normal ram is always the priority if it is available, so any time the phone retrieves data from the swap it avoids having to relaunch an app killed due to memory pressure, which would take longer. As Android is already pretty aggressive about killing apps to save battery, in the majority of cases the swap would be used to ease the blow of a sudden, memory intensive task like high resolution video editing.

    Let's assume the phone storage can take 256 read write cycles (which is a low estimate). Considering that phones have at least 256 gigs of storage nowadays that gives an allowance of 18 gigs written per day for a phone with 10 year lifespan. Considering that I very rarely change the contents of the storage and the memory will likely not spill over by that amount, or at all most days, it's safe to say flash health isn't a concern.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    The one time I did lose my draft, I couldn't get it back. There's no setting for memory on Android on Voyager.

    So you're saying there is a swap file (I'm on a cheapier Samsung Tablet A right now), but even that's too small to hold much memory. I know in Windows you could set the size of the swap file; honestly, I'd much rather wait an extra second to get the program back into RAM than lose a draft, so I think there really must be a good technical reason it's not happening.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Idk the Samsung tablet. And yeah it might be device dependent, too. I guess I didn't think of that being the case.

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    [–] 8 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Contact the developer of Voyager and request a feature to automatically save drafts. This is handled at the app level in Android, and it's 100% possible for the app to handle this transparently.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    It's supposed to save drafts; it just didn't in my case, and in other people's cases as well.

    The Voyager lemmy hasn't been too interested in my feedback.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    Then I suggest using Interstellar if draft saving is important to you. I've never had an automatic draft fail to save on Interstellar.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    I believe in the developer setting you can set up howmuch you wish to store in memory and such. But this has an impact on your battery life.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Why does it necessarily have an impact on battery life? Can it just be dumped into memory and frozen there as a snap shot? It doesn't need to be running.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I'm not a computer scientist, but doesn't keeping RAM engaged cost energy? You can't turn off your computer and expect the RAM to be unaffected like a hard drive is

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Indeed, RAM is a memory latch by use of a capacitor. And on an interval it replenishes the charge of this capacitor . Thus when there is no power it will lose all its data.

    These days it is possible (and Android has/does this) to just write old programs from RAM memory to the SSD, this is a slow process back and forth. But it saves RAM space and power.

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 3 months ago

    I think it costs electricity to flip bits, but unless things are moving, there's not much going on. If the app isn't actively being used, I was wondewring why it couldn't just get frozen in carbonite and dumped into storage until the user needed it again.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Some Androids do it. Motorola calls it "RAM Boost". It is basically a swap.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Because Linux and Windows take a different approach to memory management.

    And Android is based on Linux.

    https://linuxvox.com/blog/linux-oom-killer/

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