Project Butter that was seen first time on Jelly Bean(v4.1) brought the improvement in General Android interface fluidity, its immediate successor Project Svelte's main agenda is to run Stock Android system fluidity even on devices with paltry 512 MB RAM. I have already posted how KitKat runs smoothly in devices with 512 MB RAM.
And now Dave Burke the head of engineering for Android, has given some details of the technicalities of Project Svelte.
The team separated Google apps Suite from the Android system and started analyzing how much memory each app consumes, and it has been found that some of the apps running their services 24 hours a day in background.
Procstats(can be found in system>Developer Options in KitKat devices), a tool created by Google engineers, to show users and developers how much memory each apps and processes are consuming.
The goals were as follows:
* Reduce the footprint of system
* Reduce the footprint (memory usage) of the apps that run on a Google Experience (read Nexus)
device
* Fix how apps react and crash during bad memory situations
* Provide better measurement and instrumentation of how apps are running in Android, so that developers can see how memory conscious their apps really are.
Keeping the above mentioned goals in mind, the team isolated the Google apps that were consuming too much memory, Then not only did they optimize their code, but they also made Android itself shutting down any apps which don't need to consume RAM unnecessarily.
While testing this process Dave Burke made sure each engineer on the team carry a downgraded version of Nexus 4 as the testing device. This quickens the Project Svelte significantly. He said, “ The goal of Project Svelte was basically to reduce the memory footprint to fit into lower end devices with 512 MB RAM. The way we did it by the way was to take a Nexus 4 and adapt it to run at 512 MB RAM".
The next step was to run KitKat at lower screen resolution and on two processors instead of 4.
They adapted the resolution to qHD(960x540p) as this is the kind of resolution that entry level smartphones eye for. And adapted it to run at 2 processors at lower clock speed instead of 4. And some of the engineers used this as their primary device. It was painful and broken to start with. Dave Burke also added.
This way, isolating the bad memory situations and reducing the system footprint as well as Google apps footprint, the engineering team managed to make a huge step towards reducing fragmentation.
Even the lower end small smartphone manufacturers who often ship their phones with Gingerbread can now ship with the latest version of Android without worrying about the phone's performance.
And now Dave Burke the head of engineering for Android, has given some details of the technicalities of Project Svelte.
The team separated Google apps Suite from the Android system and started analyzing how much memory each app consumes, and it has been found that some of the apps running their services 24 hours a day in background.
Procstats(can be found in system>Developer Options in KitKat devices), a tool created by Google engineers, to show users and developers how much memory each apps and processes are consuming.
The goals were as follows:
* Reduce the footprint of system
* Reduce the footprint (memory usage) of the apps that run on a Google Experience (read Nexus)
device
* Fix how apps react and crash during bad memory situations
* Provide better measurement and instrumentation of how apps are running in Android, so that developers can see how memory conscious their apps really are.
Keeping the above mentioned goals in mind, the team isolated the Google apps that were consuming too much memory, Then not only did they optimize their code, but they also made Android itself shutting down any apps which don't need to consume RAM unnecessarily.
While testing this process Dave Burke made sure each engineer on the team carry a downgraded version of Nexus 4 as the testing device. This quickens the Project Svelte significantly. He said, “ The goal of Project Svelte was basically to reduce the memory footprint to fit into lower end devices with 512 MB RAM. The way we did it by the way was to take a Nexus 4 and adapt it to run at 512 MB RAM".
The next step was to run KitKat at lower screen resolution and on two processors instead of 4.
They adapted the resolution to qHD(960x540p) as this is the kind of resolution that entry level smartphones eye for. And adapted it to run at 2 processors at lower clock speed instead of 4. And some of the engineers used this as their primary device. It was painful and broken to start with. Dave Burke also added.
This way, isolating the bad memory situations and reducing the system footprint as well as Google apps footprint, the engineering team managed to make a huge step towards reducing fragmentation.
Even the lower end small smartphone manufacturers who often ship their phones with Gingerbread can now ship with the latest version of Android without worrying about the phone's performance.
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