[Touch Diamond, MDA Compact IV ROM Development] bill48105:
Memory tweak findings

Howdy,

I decided to spend some time & sit down & try some scenarios to see how much free ram is possible with the latest Energy ROM's and how much ram each optional thing consumes (just subtract the right value 1 line above from the right value to find the difference) so people can make their own decision as to which they need & which combination makes their Diamond work & look the way they want.

List is in order that I tested from highest memory usage (lowest free) to most free with 1st column being the thing I disabled/changed & 2nd how much free ram there was after making the change & soft resetting then waiting for the phone to finish booting & not pressing any buttons or the screen except to navigate to Memory

28008 Standard 2.5 (4MB pagepool)

Change FREE RAM

====== =======

Fresh (default) 31.5MB

HTC Black Home 33.36MB

Using Titanium instead of HTC Sense 48.28MB

Using MS Dialer 53.6MB

Disabling Titanium (blank home) 55.29MB

Cache tweaks 56.45MB

Disabled MS MyPhone service 56.78MB

Disabled STK Service 56.9MB

Deleted QuickMenu lnk 57.37MB

Installed Gen.Y VolumeControl 59.31MB

Total memory increase 27.81MB! Obviously some people are not going to be happy disabling/changing some items (and maybe some of them might even break things or aren't worth bothering with) but at least it gives you an idea of how much memory each thing can free.

For someone who MUST have 28008 & HTC Sense the highest free memory with all of the above tweaks was 41.63MB so really no one should complain about memory usage of this ROM if they just take the time to disable some unnecessary stuff. Or sell their Diamond & get a phone MADE to run those. :P

One odd thing is this ROM what looks like a blown up standard volume control (vs HTC single slider one) but for some reason installing Gen.Y VolumeControl v1.6.18182826.1 actually freed up almost 2MB of ram AND put HTC volume control on! Very strange but hey I'll take what I can get.

Something I should mention is this ROM was VERRRRYY slow with HTC Sense enabled & no way would I choose to use Sense & deal with that. I have a feeling it was the 4MB pagefile (and likely high cpu usage) but I didn't take the time to put on the original because I could care less about Touch Flo or Sense but I figured so many people were complaining about memory usage I would start set 4MB pagepool which I thought would give the most free memory possible. To me I'd rather use Titanium or even blank screen with Digital Clock added to have a much faster phone that pretty home screen that is dog slow but that is just me. ;)

Note: To get the free memory on 2.5 was by using QuickMenu->Settings->System->Memory until the step where I disabled QuickMenu (I noticed it used 576K of ram in task manager so I figured I'd try deleting the lnk from Startup) so the last 2 are by clicking Start->Settings->System->Memory. I mention this because free memory was different depending on which method I used.

21877 Titanium (4MB Pagepool)

Change FREE RAM

====== =======

Fresh (default) 52.4MB

HTC Black 54.2MB

MS Dialer 59.1MB

Blank Home 61.0MB

Cache tweaks 63.3MB

Disable MS MyPhone 63.3MB

Disable STK Service 63.4MB

Install Gen.Y VolumeControl 65.1MB

Total memory increase of 12.7MB and possibly a whopping 65MB free! With Titanium & better dialer there is still a very respectable 58.3MB free & a very usable phone. That is how I'm running mine right now & if I needed to get a little more ram to run something I'd just turn off Titanium & have a plain Home screen but 58MB free should be plenty & is actually a lot more than even the stock ROM!

For the 21877 ROM I tested ram by choosing task manger icon from upper right corner then clicking Memory tab.

UPDATE: I wanted to mention that there was a noticeable difference in overall speed on these ROM's where I changed the pagepool & did these tweaks. (I am guessing most likely pagepool but possibly one of the other tweaks) Pressing the Talk button on 2 Diamonds side by side it was very clear one was faster than the other. So unless you REALLY need the extra RAM it'd probably be best to stick with the default pagepool or at least do further testing to see which of the things caused the slowdown. Again the point of this whole experiment was to prove lots of free ram was possible with these ROM's, likely at the expense of performance for some of them.

UPDATE2: I wanted to point out that installing Gen.Y VolumeControl replaces HTCVolumeControl.dll which contains the taskbar icons for volume status so you'll notice those get changed from the prettier ones included with the ROM. I assume the icons could be changed/fixed, that cab was just an easy one for me to use to test the memory differences. Also note that one benefit of using that cab is in-call volume control seems to work unlike the HTC volume control built into the ROM's.

I can't take credit for these as pretty much all of them were found somewhere so thanks to anyone who posted them up or made the utils to make them possible/easier.

Hopefully this helps

Bill