Memory issues on my E2

[ArchiveGuest]

(This post was originally by badr)
Hi,

I've downloaded the trial for sudoku but i keep running into memory issues no matter how many times i reinstall the game in the unit or on the card. I've got 12 MB of memory on my SD card and 7 MB of available memory on my E2. what gives? Any ideas?

thanks

[Kristopher]

I copied games to RAM until I only had 4MB free, but Sudoku still runs fine. Can you run Bejeweled 2 or Zuma?

[ArchiveGuest]

(This post was originally by badr)
i have no problem with bejeweled2. I was reading about the problems on palm os4 and decided to try a soft reset to see if it works and it seemed to help.
We'll see how long this lasts.

[Kristopher]

Sounds like the Soft Reset is a big thing to all of you, and that's probably because you only have Astraware games. With all of the titles I have downloaded from other companies, My Palm resets about every other day.
It's a big, erraneous world out there.
:)

[catmom]

I have lots of games and do lots of resets (not always voluntarily). Apparently, because the E2 has a flash memory, the DB cache is handled differently. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it seems that the system isn't always exactly sure how much memory is really free. A soft reset usually seems to fix this. I've had this problem on several large-file games (over 1 mb) - Bejeweled, Pixelus, etc. I've seen explanations from several software companies saying that they are waiting for Palm to issue a fix or upgrade to resolve the problem.

[icebox]

If you're referring to the "not enough memory" error that comes up on startup, I have that on my E2 from time to time. There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason why it happens on my machine; but luckily it doesn't happen that often. It's highly annoying when it occurs in that it requires a soft reset to fix the problem. This is the only game that has ever produced the error for me, and I have a bunch of other astraware titles on my palm, including some that require more memory (e.g., wild west words) but have never produced this error. I have about 8MB free, so there is no free memory problem on my palm.

[Kieren]

Hi folks,

With regards to the "Not enough memory" error message that some of you have reported, could I possibly ask if you can tell me whether the error message text refers to "heap" memory?

Heap memory is a second, hidden amount of memory on your Palm which is used much like the RAM of a PC, for running applications. It's not something that you can easily check to see how much you have free, and under normal circumstances you don't need to - the Palm keeps this memory as empty as possible, and few applications need to use more than a fraction of it.

Games however, are always a bit more demanding on memory, and tend to require large, single blocks of heap memory to load things like graphics - again, this isn't normally a problem as the Palm tries to keep this heap memory tidy, but it's not perfect. Sometimes, over time, the heap memory of the device can become broken up (fragmented) into small individual chunks through normal use, even though the total amount of free memory is still the same.

As games often require larger single chunks than most normal applications, these are most likely to run into problems where the available chunks of memory aren't big enough for what it needs to do, and in our case this prompts this "Insufficient Memory" error message about heap memory. A soft reset of your Palm always prompts the device to defragment the heap to the best possible extent, which is why programs will often start running again after a soft reset.

Predicting what causes the heap memory to fragment is tricky (in fact, nearly impossible), and all developers do their best to minimise it, but as with the need to defragment the hard drive of a PC sometimes you have to prompt the machine to do it manually :)

A soft reset should solve this problem in almost all cases, but there are other causes for an "Insufficient heap memory" error message - if you're still having problems, please let me know!

Warmest regards,
Kieren
Technical Support

[ArchiveGuest]

(This post was originally by msneff)
Kieren, in response to your query, the message doesn't mention heap memory: "This game requires more free storage memory than your handheld has available." I have almost 12 MB of 29.7 free, you say that the problem is fragmentation? Handheld is E2 (same as others in this thread).

Mary S. Neff

[Kieren]

Kieren, in response to your query, the message doesn't mention heap memory: "This game requires more free storage memory than your handheld has available." I have almost 12 MB of 29.7 free, you say that the problem is fragmentation? Handheld is E2 (same as others in this thread).


I'd have to double check, but it's possible that a recent incarnation of the error message doesn't distinguish in the text between "heap" memory (the type I was referring to above) and "storage" memory (the main memory of the Palm). If this is the case, then we should adjust the messages to make them clearer, but in the meantime can I possibly ask you to try a soft reset anyway, just in case it does help?

If not, please let me know, and I'll see what else we can try!

Warmest regards,
Kieren