[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] edhaas:
Memory discussion!

Happy to help. Glad you're liking the rom. I'm not finding much different in feel from the D-Lite rom (which is a good thing). Everything is working well for me as well. HSPDA, a2dp, wireless stereo over wireless radio in sleep mode sounds great. No lockups so far. All my apps work as before.

Tutorial regarding memory: In this rom there are two types of built in memory, storage memory and program memory. They are physically different and cannot be interchanged via programming. In other roms, the storage memory is broken up and part if it is used as "extended_rom" which is meant to be hidden and used by carriers to put their particular customizations in, which are generally only used once after a hard-reset. This partition was about 10mb in size. Bepe has figured out a modification, which removes this partition and makes the user storage partition (where programs are stored, similar to a disk drive) correspondingly larger. Another partition is used to store the base programs which are "flashed" and include the operating system. Tadzio figured out how to move the boundary of this partition so that smaller roms will free up more storage memory as well.

So, end of history lesson. The storage memory is what is left after all of this, and is used as a "disk drive" equivalent, it is slower than the "program memory" which is like "ram" in your computer. However, storage memory is generally faster than SD card memory, and is preferred especially for "resident" or today screen type programs, because it's instantly available when you first turn on the device. Most of what I and others have done is to maximize the amount of this memory which is available to you, so you can fill it up with programs that load more quickly than if you put them in SD memory. In this rom that free space starts off at 71.47 mb, and then at start-up the operating system allocates some for it's own use, and in other roms customization programs loaded after cold reboot are loaded in there. So, in this rom there are actually 67mb available for the user to play with, which is a ton, and pretty much overkill for 99% of people including myself. As long as there are around 10mb free for the system, the device will work well.

Program memory is "ram". It is the fastest memory and programs in actual use are executed from there in chunks loaded from storage or SD card memory. It starts as 64mb, but the device uses a good chunk of it internally which we have no control over, and so reports the 51.02 mb as what is initially available. However, an additional chunk is used by the operating system, of around 15 mb, leaving the rest for us to actually use. The page pool, which is a buffer used between ram and storage memory comes out of this, as does the ram used by any start-up programs. Generally, as long as you have about 5 mb or so available, the device works pretty well.

[Edit: Addendum: In this rom I have removed error reporting and customer feedback, I'm having more difficulty removing the icons for them however. The other things you mention could be removed, but this would reduce functionality for folks who use those things, and would only add slightly to available storage memory, which as I stated above is already in the "overkill" category. I'll probably cut some more stuff in later versions as I gain experience with this rom, but I doubt there will be any noticeable difference in performance or usability.]

This is a bare-bones account, but hopefully will help you conceptualize things.

Best wishes, and enjoy! :)