Created by Michael Allen, last modified on Jul 27, 2017

Table of Contents

Overview

At a glance:

  • Roku devices have anywhere from 256 MB DRAM on the lowest end devices, to 1.5 GB DRAM on the Dallas platform. 
  • While many applications like image processing or 3D modeling software benefit greatly from a large amount of RAM, this is usually not the case for channels running on Roku OS. 
  • For nearly all channels, RAM will not be a bottleneck for performance unless you have a serious memory leak somewhere. 
  • A channel is far more likely to hit the texture memory or CPU ceiling than to ever run out of RAM, and your channel is sandboxed such that the Roku device will always allocate and save enough RAM for video buffering. In addition, if your channel uses a large amount of RAM (over ~80MB) it will simply be killed before performance hits are noticeable.

Viewing system memory

For SceneGraph apps

For SceneGraph apps,  just like above, run the channel and port 8080.  Then run "sgnodes all"

For pre-SceneGraph apps

For pre-SceneGraph apps, telnet to the console; hit ^C to break into the debugger; run "bcs" or "bscs"
Note: This is also useful for SceneGraph apps.