boxieblue wrote:N8, rather the Symbian^3 OS, brings the feature of "writable demand paging", which has been clearly mentioned in this article. So despite having a lesser amount of RAM, using it will make it seem as if there is actually a lot more. The reason is that only the most active applications remain in RAM, while the rest are written to disk space. AFAIK, no competitor (incl. WebOS, Android, iOS, Blackberry OS, WP7, Bada) offers the feature so far...
Wow.. Despite all the advantages of "Paging files" and virtual memory, does everyone seem to forget that the concept read/writes to a much slower flash memory rather than actual fast RAM? No matter what, virtual memory is just that.. virtual and can never be compared to real memory that offers much more speed.
Even for multitasking and that the writable demand paging keeps a segment of the active applications in memory whilst paging the non active elements, it will be penalised when accessing those components since it has to reload it from the much slower storage.
This unfortunately does NOT make it any "BETTER" than another device that has twice the memory. In fact, other devices with more RAM can do the exact reverse of this situation by creating a pseudo disk cache to improve the read/write performance.
viipottaja wrote:bchliu, well the category you refer to N8 was "multi-tasking, processor and speedt". So not just RAM. Yes, I think Steve should have split that category to three at least (multi-tasking on its own, speed on its own, and processor spec on its own)/
Ditto with my previous comment - the N8 still loses out in all aspects compared to the alternative offerings. Less Processor speed (compared to the 1Ghz competitors) = less performance regardless of differences in OS, Less Memory = reliance on slower paging and no caching for less performance and worse off for multitasking.
Have you actually tried N8s multi-tasking and compared it with the other devices?
Hi Folks,
Steve's article is spot on 😊
Suffice to say in Symbian Devices at Nokia we of course have done similar analysis. N8 is the first step (and you should be very pleased with this step), so watch this space, and of course do not forget ontop of the RAM in the N8 we have WDP as well.
Cheers,
Kevin McIntyre
bchliu wrote:Wow.. Despite all the advantages of "Paging files" and virtual memory, does everyone seem to forget that the concept read/writes to a much slower flash memory rather than actual fast RAM? No matter what, virtual memory is just that.. virtual and can never be compared to real memory that offers much more speed.Even for multitasking and that the writable demand paging keeps a segment of the active applications in memory whilst paging the non active elements, it will be penalised when accessing those components since it has to reload it from the much slower storage.
This unfortunately does NOT make it any "BETTER" than another device that has twice the memory. In fact, other devices with more RAM can do the exact reverse of this situation by creating a pseudo disk cache to improve the read/write performance.
On any device I have been using for with any type of paging (including WDP), it has only improved the experience, and I am a power user. I cannot see any 'real' performance degradation.
Cheers,
Kevin McIntyre
bchliu wrote:Wow.. Despite all the advantages of "Paging files" and virtual memory, does everyone seem to forget that the concept read/writes to a much slower flash memory rather than actual fast RAM? No matter what, virtual memory is just that.. virtual and can never be compared to real memory that offers much more speed.Even for multitasking and that the writable demand paging keeps a segment of the active applications in memory whilst paging the non active elements, it will be penalised when accessing those components since it has to reload it from the much slower storage.
This unfortunately does NOT make it any "BETTER" than another device that has twice the memory. In fact, other devices with more RAM can do the exact reverse of this situation by creating a pseudo disk cache to improve the read/write performance.
Can you tell us what else you found out when you tried the device?
viipottaja wrote:Have you actually tried N8s multi-tasking and compared it with the other devices?
The closest relative to the N8 that does have proper Paging and virtual memory is the N900.. which I use daily. Try opening up a few heavy applications (Easy Debian with Open Office) with memory heavy web pages and you'll see the pauses whilst it is accessing from the slower Flash.
I suggest that anyone - anonymous to the forum or not, that starts to debate about whether physical memory is faster, or virtual memory is faster - that they do some research first. I highly suggest looking into the Wiki article on paging:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging
"Because RAM is faster than auxiliary storage, paging is avoided until there is not enough RAM to store all the data needed. When this occurs, a page in RAM is moved to auxiliary storage, freeing up space in RAM for use. Thereafter, whenever the page in secondary storage is needed, a page in RAM is saved to auxiliary storage so that the requested page can then be loaded into the space left behind by the old page"
Realistically - if your multitasking is taking you more than 2 seconds to swap between applications (since you have to access the slower storage), then you have to ask yourself.. how good will be user experience be? You tap something and three seconds later, it responds. It might be ok if you are patient, but you do have to wonder about that sometimes... Its kind of like trying to run Windows XP with only 64MB of RAM.. yes, it will run.. but it will swap like hell and realistically be unusable.