Why You Should Care About Your Phone’s RAM

Computer terminology can be a little confusing to the average user. There’s a lot of acronyms and technical phrases, and while we know they all work in tandem to ensure our phones, it can be a little difficult to figure out what each of them is responsible for. RAM stands for random-access memory, and it is concerned mostly with what your phone is “currently thinking,” so to speak. To ensure that your RAM isn’t overworked, use the memory booster feature to close background apps and speed up your device:

Read More: All About RAM Speed and How it Affects Your Gameplay

Occasionally it lays dormant, waiting to be activated. These are things your phone remembers how to do, but it’s not the sort of memory RAM is concerned with. That’s “hard drive” data — things like documents, apps, photos, etc. — that are stored there, and they’ll be there every time you turn your phone off and back on.

RAM is concerned with active memory. The second you open Instagram is the second RAM kicks it, and it’s the reason you don’t have to reopen Instagram if you close the window briefly to make a phone call. When you open Instagram again, it doesn’t have to reload the whole app because RAM remembered it was running Instagram and continued to run the program even while you made your call.

RAM is short-term memory, and it stops remembering the second you definitively close the app (instead of just minimizing the window) as well as every time you turn your phone off and back on. Your RAM dictates how fast your phone runs, and it’s the reason your phone slows down the more apps you have open: it’s got a lot on its mind, all of a sudden, and has to split its attention.

What does that mean for you? Essentially, if you’re the type of person who has a lot of apps open at once, you’re going to want to make sure your RAM is powerful enough to match. Apps such as games, which have a lot of things happening at once while they’re open, eat up a lot of RAM. So, be careful about eating it up.