Owners have noticed the Galaxy S6 often tends to become unresponsive after being in use for a little while. On a lesser phone, you could easily put this down to insufficient RAM — the short-term memory used to hold apps and files that are currently in use.
The S6 has a whopping 3GB of RAM though — more than many laptops have. This may lead you to think that other factors are at play here but you would be wrong. TechRadar reports Samsung has been forced to admit its new flagship for 2015 is completely incapable of correctly managing all of that memory.
The device does not remove things from RAM as quickly as it should which can lead to massive amounts being consumed. On some devices, over 2.5GB of the 3GB of memory has been seen to be occupied with the phone doing nothing more strenuous than idling on the homescreen.
RAM is the fastest form of memory used in mobile devices. When an app is loaded from the phone’s storage, most of its core files are transferred into RAM to speed it up and enable quick access to its functions. When you press home, the app will still remain in RAM so that you can quickly open it again. This is why an app will open much quicker if launched a second time soon after you first opened it.
The issue is that as more apps are opened, RAM begins to fill up. This is solved by removing background apps that have not been used for a while for RAM — but in some cases, the S6 seems to have forgotten this bit.
It is letting the number of apps in RAM increase so much that most of the phone’s memory is completely consumed. This leaves none left to run core features of the device so the whole interface will feel slow and unresponsive. The effect is even more noticeable when launching more apps.
Samsung has now acknowledged the issue and is working on fixes. They will be rolling-out in the coming days and will fix the memory management issues. If you have noticed that your S6 quickly slows down after starting up, this is why. It is recommended that you click that “update” button when it appears in the next few days.
