Virtual RAM: More storage or gimmick? (2024)

Virtual RAM has now become ubiquitous in smartphones. After being present in PCs for years, the technology is being used by smartphone brands to make their products, especially in the entry-level and budget segments, more compelling to customers who treat the amount of RAM as a key factor in making the purchase decision. While most brands are restricted to offering as low as 3GB or 4GB RAM in smartphones priced under Rs 10,000, adding another 4GB of virtual RAM - effectively marketing the product as having "4GB+4GB RAM" - gives an impression that the handset is more capable than before. But adding 4GB virtual RAM over 4GB physical RAM is not the same as having 8GB RAM in a mobile phone. At best, the marketing gimmick is good for keeping more apps running in the background, but has little impact in improving the overall performance of the phone or running heaving apps.

How does RAM work?

RAM, or random access memory, is a high-speed storage that stores data on a temporary basis, unlike the internal storage where data is stored permanently till its deleted or overwritten manually. RAM is called volatile memory because of its temporary nature, but is much faster than other types of memory such as hard drives.

What is virtual RAM?
Virtual RAM is a feature on some Android smartphones that uses a portion of the device's internal storage to temporarily act as additional RAM. It refers to RAM that is not physically present on your device, but is called to action when needed. Virtual RAM is called by different names by brands, such as RAM Plus (Samsung), Dynamic RAM Expansion (Realme), Memory Fusion (Tecno), RAM Expansion (Oppo) and simply Virtual RAM (Vivo). The technology, though, does the same thing: borrow memory from internal storage to provide extra RAM when needed.

Memory management on Android

Android works on the premise that free memory is wasted memory, and tries to use all of the available memory at all times, resulting in apps being stored in memory long after they have been closed by the user. Some, like the Facebook app, do not need refreshing when they are in the background, so they remain static in RAM. Some others, like Spotify, keep running even when the app is removed from the foreground, using RAM dynamically to scale up or down depending on the activity. These dynamic operations are delegated to a partition in the memory which Google calls zRAM, where the app is compressed so that it does not overload the phone.

How is Virtual RAM beneficial?

As budget smartphones already have less amount of RAM to work with (most come with 4GB RAM), virtual RAM is deployed by creating a zRAM partition out of the internal storage, so as to expand the memory capability in storing more of such dynamic apps. As a result, budget phones become more capable in running more apps on the device, especially those which get refreshed or updated in the background.

Is Virtual RAM a good thing? What no one will tell you...
For one, using storage as RAM is not really beneficial as the natures of the 2 components are different. While RAM is non-volatile storage where any byte of memory can be accessed directly without having to read the preceding bytes, hard drives store data sequentially and must be read from the beginning to reach a specific location. Further, RAMs operate at much higher speeds as compared to storage memory. While this means virtual RAM may not work as fast as normal RAM, more importantly, it may reduce the life span of the internal storage as it is not meant for frequent read-write operations required to function as RAM.

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