Windows Phone Thoughts: Who's Using My RAM? Mike Calligaro Answers

"In my recent "Where's My RAM" entry, I explained why you tend to see a difference between what the WM5 device reports as "Total" RAM and what you know the device actually has. In other words, "Why does my 64M RAM device say it only has 50M?" In the comments for that entry people asked about the reported "In Use" numbers. "In Use" shows how much of the total RAM the system is using right then. The general consensus among the commenters was that WM5 took three times as much RAM to boot as WM2003 SE. This was shocking to me, because I know the steps we took to keep that from happening. WM5 is a massive upgrade, with a new OS, new apps, and a ton of new features. We were very worried about bloat, and did a number of things to combat it. We funded a group whose sole job was to analyze performance (including RAM usage) and keep it under control. Those folks did a bunch of work to reduce RAM usage. We also purposely limited the amount of RAM available on the devices our developers used. Almost all of our devices only had 32M of RAM, and the one device that had more, we artificially limited to only use 32M. We didn't want anyone to get lazy."

Some further details about why Windows Mobile 5 seem to have so little RAM available after a soft reset. Everything that Mike is saying is logical, but that still doesn't dispel the feeling that Windows Mobile 5 devices are a step back in some ways when it comes to memory usage and speed. Using a VGA device (the Jasjar) with Flash ROM is a double-whammy on performance, but I was hoping for more speed that what I'm seeing. The comment from Alex Kac of WebIS was especially interesting, and one that I agree with - now that Microsoft has hit the 50% overall market share number, I think they can afford to lean on the OEM/ODMs a bit more to ensure a better device experience for end users (and that includes OS upgrades).