The concept of "free memory" on a modern system also makes no sense. RAM that is not used is wasted. (Up to a point; the OS will try to keep a percentage actually free so it can always do some work, but this is not much compared to the total.) The more of your RAM that is taken up, the more data you have cached.
> The concept of "free memory" on a modern system also makes no sense. RAM that is not used is wasted.
The problem is that the iPhone OS tends to have issues with releasing memory especially in high-pressure situations e.g. games. It's quite frequent that out of the ~60MB non-OS RAM of a 3G a game only gets to use 10~20MB, and lags (or even crashes for the most intense ones) because of that. The initial "solution" was to reboot the damn phone in order to kill the MobileMail and MobileSafari background processes.
"Free memory" functions give users the ability to kill those without having to restart the phone, which far shorten the time it takes to "reclaim" all your ram and be in an ideal position to launch a demanding game.
And apple's ripping on WiMo's task manager comes to bite the users's asses.
This is the game developer's issue -- on the iPhone, you must avoid extreme memory pressure and ramp up your usage gradually enough to allow the OS to exit background applications.
I wouldn't be surprised if "Free Memory" functionality was a placebo in the vast number of cases: the number jumps from 4 megabytes to 20 megabytes, isn't that an improvement? Never you mind all those cached pages the OS just dropped.
In the cases where it's not a placebo, it's a bug in the original application. If "free memory" functionality allows you to work around that bug, I can see how you would be frustrated with its removal from App Store applications.
Of course, as stupid as I think it is to charge money for a malloc()+bzero() in a loop, I still don't think Apple should be censoring applications.
> on the iPhone, you must avoid extreme memory pressure and ramp up your usage gradually enough to allow the OS to exit background applications.
Definitely, but when you're playing a game which is all in all pretty nice apart from the memory issues (on a 2G or a 3G, he 3GS tends not to have problems there of course), if a simple RAM wipe allows you to spend a nice commute, you're not going to go whine to the dev and then spend an awful commute. I won't anyway.
> I wouldn't be surprised if "Free Memory" functionality was a placebo in the vast number of cases
It's not. The effect is noticeable in many cases.
> Never you mind all those cached pages the OS just dropped.
Since you're usually freeing memory to open a game, you don't really care for those dropped cached pages. You care for the game you're trying to play.
