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I have a game on my iPod Touch called "Scene It? Movies 2". If I start that up while having too many other apps 'open', it shows me a dialog box saying, "Low Me
by CmdrKrool 15y ago
I have a game on my iPod Touch called "Scene It? Movies 2". If I start that up while having too many other apps 'open', it shows me a dialog box saying, "Low Memory Warning - The system memory is low. To improve performance, please quit the game and then restart your device". Ever since seeing that, I've felt obliged to remove every app (except perhaps the built-in ones) from the iOS 'task switcher' after I'm done with it.
The article says "If the device needs more memory for a game or other large app, Suspended apps will be cleared from RAM", so what might Scene It be complaining about? Perhaps it's about apps in 'Background' state (no wait, masklinn has stated in this thread that /any/ non-foregrounded application can be terminated to free up memory).
While Scene It is probably just a crappy app (and I don't play it anymore anyway), I have to admit that I'm still unsure and I'm probably going to carry on, reflexively, closing apps myself just to be sure, and because I'm a bit OCD that way. Hooray for leaky abstractions.
- irq 15y agoThe main reason some iOS apps say this is because of how sensitive some iOS apps are to low memory conditions. It's true that iOS will automatically terminate non-foreground applications to free RAM, however this process is not instantaneous. It's fast, but sometimes all it takes is a few milliseconds for a poorly written memory-hungry app to crash due to insufficient memory. Another scenario poorly written iOS apps come into is being too aggressive about memory allocation, which can trigger iOS to kill the app (which looks like a crash to the end user). Even well-written apps can run into this problem, especially on older devices (only the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and iPad2 have 512MB RAM. Everything else has 256MB or less.)