How to use Android Marshmallow RAM manager?

What is Android Marshmallow RAM manager?

Android Marshmallow RAM manager allows you to check memory (RAM) of the system and individual apps. This may help you understand and diagnosis some performance issues you may encounter for you phone or tablet.

You can then also Android Marshmallow RAM manager to force stop apps that use memory excessively. But rarely, you have to manually force stop an app. Android has a good resource manager already.

This means it is not necessary to install task manager apps or memory optimization apps in Android Marshmallow. Most of the third-party task manger apps actually do not improve the performance of your Android devices.

Please note, although Android Marshmallow RAM manager is offered in vanilla Android and most other Android devices with Marshmallow or later versions,   some vendors, e.g., Samsung, may offer RAM manager through applications manager only.

Some Android vendors may offer their own task manager, including RAM manager.

How to use Android Marshmallow RAM manager?

There are two ways to access Android Marshmallow RAM manager.

Method 1: access Android Marshmallow RAM manager directly

For most Android devices, you can access RAM manager in Android marshmallow from Settings —Memory as shown below. Some vendors may just name it as RAM, or RAM manager.

After tapping Memory, you can find memory usage as shown below.

By default, the memory usage report is for last 3 hours. You can tap the arrow button next to 3 hours as shown below to change the report for:

• 3  hours
• 6 hours
• 12 hours
• 1 day

To check RAM usage by individual apps, tap “Memory used by apps” as shown below.

All apps that were active in last 3 hours will then be listed. The amount of RAM used by individual apps is of course listed.

By default, the memory reported is average value in immediately last 3 hours. Sometimes, you may be interested in the maximum (peak) memory usage of some apps.

You can tap the menu key (3 vertical dots) as shown above. Then tap  sort by max use as shown above to check the peak memory usage of these apps. The memory usage reported now is the peak (maximum) usage.

After sorting the apps either based on average RAM usage or max usage, you can then further work on individual apps.

For example, in this guide, I want to check RAM usage of Pages manager app.

Tap the app (Pages manager) as shown above.

The average memory usage and  maximum memory usage will be listed as shown below.

Another important info you can get from memory usage is the running frequency of the app. For some apps with heavy background processes, the frequency can be close to 100% and therefore the app may drain a lot of battery juice.

You can tap the menu key (3 vertical dots, marked as 1) as shown below, then tap Force stop to stop this app. Please note some apps may restart automatically after you force  stop it. By default, Android does not allow you to control auto-start feature of apps without rooting the phone.

You can also tap the info button (marked as 2) as shown below to get detailed app info for this app.

The app info as shown above is actually identical to what you get from application manager.

But in Android Marshmallow, if you scroll down, you can find one more entry for Memory.  Memory usage (3-hour average) of this app is reported.

Tap Memory as shown above to go back to the memory usage page shown earlier.

Method 2:  access Android Marshmallow RAM manager from application manager

A few Android vendors (e.g., Samsung) do not include Settings– Memory in their Android phones settings because they offer own task managers.

But such task managers may not be even good. For example, in Galaxy S6, S7 and Note 5, Samsung bundled Smart Manager, which is definitely not a good alternative.

So, in such devices, the alternative way to access Android Marshmallow RAM manager is from application manager, which is universal on all Android phones and tablets.

You can access application manager from Settings— Apps (some vendors may name it as Application Manager).

In Application manager, you can tap individual apps. As shown above, in the app info for individual apps, you can find the Memory entry in Android Marshmallow. Tap it to enter memory usage page for this app.

Do you know how to use Android Marshmallow RAM manager?

If you have any questions or encounter any problems on using Android Marshmallow RAM manager, please let us know them in the comment box below.

The community will help you.

For any questions or problems with Android Marshmallow, please check our Android Marshmallow Guide page.

If your question is about Android Lollipop, please check out Android Lollipop Guide page.

For other Android guides, please check our Android 101 page.