Android: low on space?

Sunday, 3 July, 2011

I hit the “Low on Space” problem again on my Orange San Francisco…. Ive just ignored this in the past, deleted a few apps on got on with life. This hit just before my bike ride trip and I didn’t want to delete any apps so sat down when I got back to try to sort it out. One problem beset by a few San Francisco’s is the 512Mb RAM being restricted to 256Mb. Not so on mine, so this wasn’t the issue. I could free up a little space as Froyo allows you to move many apps to the SD card which I did, but I still ended up running low on space and couldn’t fathom given why given how much memory there was. It was at that point it dawned on me that the memory is partitioned as:

/system 210 MB - 125 MB typically used, meaning 85 MB free wasted
/cache 40 MB - 2 MB typically used, meaning 38 MB free
/data 210 MB - 200 MB used with only 10 MB free (i.e. space warning!)

What to do? Well repartition the system and cache memory and use it for data to reclaim somewhere in the region of 130Mb for more sensible use. This page over at Modaco runs through various schemes to increase space including partition resizing to give the following setup:

/system 128 MB - 125 MB used - 3 MB free
/cache 4.5 MB - 2 MB used - 2.5 MB free
/data 330 MB - 200 MB used - 130 MB free

And that works a treat!