Comment 8 for bug 1576639

I did some extensive stress-testing on an M10, an MX4 and a E4.5, all running the latest rc-proposed image. I launched a number of applications (some native, some webapps) in the background, and then opened a number of tabs in the browser app (with the mechanism to unload tabs temporarily disabled).

I observed that even when under quite some pressure (with more than 10 tabs open and active, including memory-hungry apps like google plus, hangouts, google docs, google maps, twitter, facebook), the free memory (MemFree+Buffers+Cached) rarely seems to go below 200MB (more often on the E4.5 than on the other two devices, which is expected because the E4.5 has 1GB RAM whereas the other two have 2GB RAM).

I had to push the limits quite a bit to get the system OOM killer to kick in, and it never killed the browser app, always a background app.

Those numbers and observations seem to indicate that an arbitrary threshold of 200MB should work reasonably well, instead of a percentage of the available memory. I’ll experiment further with that value.