Memory Usage

For an application of its capabilities, multiFEED is a very compact program, loading in just a few megabytes of RAM, but the feed data it downloads can consume a significant amount of your handset's available RAM. The amount of memory multiFEED needs to run at any particular time depends on how many feeds you are subscribed to, how many articles are downloaded for each of those feeds, and the headline thumbnail settings you choose. Some examples:

• No feed data loaded: < 9MB
• Trial Version, default feeds, thumbnails off: ~30MB
• Trial Version, default feeds, small thumbnails: ~75MB
• Trial Version, default feeds, large thumbnails: ~130MB
• Premium Version, 41 feeds, thumbnails off: ~80MB
• Premium Version, 41 feeds, small thumbnails: ~145MB
• Premium Version, 41 feeds, large thumbnails: ~350MB

These examples represent a particular combination of feeds at a specific instant in time, and so should only be taken to be a rough approximation of what you may see with your own settings, but they give an idea of how RAM usage is affected by the number of feeds you set up and how you display headline thumbnails (or don't).

multiFEED tries hard to minimize RAM usage. For instance, if you have "embedded thumbnails" turned on, each image converted to a thumbnail can be up to a few megabytes in size before conversion, but multiFEED only keeps the much smaller "converted" version in RAM. Even so, if you "max out" the feed slots and enable large thumbnails for all your feeds multiFEED can consume an unacceptably large percentage of your device's RAM. If you find multiFEED is making your handset sluggish or preventing other apps from running properly, here are some things you can do to mitigate the problem:

• Set thumbnail size to small, or turn them off completely.
• Override thumbnail settings at the per-feed level, so that if you are less interested in the thumbnails for a particular feed you don't waste RAM loading them unnecessarily. As an example, if you are using the Trial version, or have kept the "Deal Sites" aggregate feed containing SlickDeals, fat wallet, and dealnews when you upgraded to Premium, completely turning of thumbnails for just those three feeds can save over 70MB of RAM due to the unusually high number of headlines those feeds contain.
• If any feed typically has a large number of articles at any one time (say, more than 30) then see if there is another version of the feed that retains articles for a shorter time.
• If you lose interest in a feed and find you no longer read it, remove it rather than just ignore it.

IMPORTANT: A serious memory management bug has been identified affecting every version of BlackBerry OS from 10.0 to at least 10.3.3. The WebView controls that multiFEED uses to display article bodies has a memory leak that gradually consumes more and more device RAM as articles are opened and closed. While the memory consumption is usually slow to increase, at random times it may jump 50-120MB in one go. After extended use of multiFEED memory usage has been seen to rise from 20-50MB initially to as much as 600MB or more. It is possible that memory consumption may even reach a level where the OS decides to shut the application down without warning to recover memoryld. It is important to understand that this is not a multiFEED bug. The problem has been submitted to and confirmed by BlackBerry, and they promised a future fix, but given the current winding down of the BlackBerry 10 platform, this is unlikely to ever be resolved. WebViews are so fundamental to the operation of multiFEED that there is no way to work around this BlackBerry 10 bug. Unless BlackBerry releases a fix, you might need to occasionally shut down and restart multiFEED to recover the excess wasted RAM.

Possibly a future release of multiFEED may allow you to specify a limit to the number of article headlines which are loaded for a feed, and also filter the headlines on various criteria, so only the headlines (and thumbnails) you are actually interested in will be loaded, thereby reducing RAM usage.