[Droid Incredible Android Development] kirkers:
Making sense of dinc memory with ext4 "no data limit" config

Thanks Tiny for the directions for using terminal. I have Android Terminal Emulator (ATE) installed, though I have hardly ever used it. In fact, it had somehow vanished, leaving only a non-functioning icon behind. Had to re-install from the Play Store!

I did an "su" to get the superuser/rooted prompt #, then entered your command suggestion:

# du -sh /data/data

It did not work; just sent back argument list for the du command, including "-s" (no "-sh" argument listed)

Tried the following:

# du -s /data/data

ATE returned the following:

239376 /data/data

I'm guessing the number records the size of folder contents in bytes, so it comes to about 240kb, right?

That means /data/data is now pretty much an empty placeholder with space devoted to an unused folder structure. This is as it should be with "no data limit" ext4, since the contents are now in /data on the sdcard's ext4 partition -- correct?

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I may just about be starting to grasp what is going on ... :fingers-crossed:

EXT4ALL with "no data limit" puts the 150MB app data memory normally handled by /data/data inside the 750MB internal memory partition created by EXT4ALL on the ext4 partition of the sdcard. So now there is 600MB left, which is shared by apps and "apps data" (the latter takes space as needed beyond the 150MB reserved solely for app data, right?).

With the "normal data" flavour of EXT4ALL, /data/data for apps data stays as it normally is somwhere inside the dinc's internal partition and with the 150MB limit, and the full 750MB created on the ext4 partition on the sdcard is available to run apps. The risk is running out of space to run app data (with the expected low memory warning), but this can be dealt with by using the "no data limit" flavour of EXT4ALL, as I am currently doing.

So, here are the best stats I can generate for my dinc with a "no data limit" ext4 partition:

Hypothesis: To get my dinc down to the ~250MB free internal memory reported in Titanium Backup Pro, the running system + user apps presumably must take 350MB of that available 600MB.

Data (from System and 2 other apps):

-- System Settings (Apps --> Running) reports: Internal memory -- 328MB used, 84MB free.

-- System Settings (Apps --> All) reports: Internal storage -- 511MB used, 237MB free

-- Titanium Backup Pro (TBP) reports: 748MB internal memory, 252MB free

-- SystemPanel Lite (SP Lite) reports: active apps 133MB, service processes 96MB, inactive cached apps 33MB for a total of 262MB;

free memory reported as 53MB, 13% of total, which would make total memory ~405MB)

*** The System "running apps" reported 328MB and the expected 350MB for used memory are fairly close, but there is still ~25MB difference.

*** The System "all apps" internal storage of 237MB comes close to TBP's 252MB (15MB difference)

*** The reported free memory numbers in System settings (running) and SP Lite are pretty close as well, with a difference of ~10MB

*** Would the difference between System's internal memory (328MB) and internal storage (511MB) of ~180MB be the /data/data moved into ext4 partition?

*** The difference between System's internal storage (511MB) and TBP's internal memory (748MB) is ~240MB. What might that represent?

Sorry for the bags of detail; hope it all reveals something that is dead obvious to you. :o

Can you help me make sense of these differing values? :confused:

Is there some thread on XDA or elsewhere that covers memory/storage and ext4, either generally or for the dinc?