PSA: You Can Optimize Your Note 4’s Recents Menu & RAM

The Note 4 never had the fastest Recents Menu, and despite its 3GB of RAM, its app-holding capabilities only got worse on Lollipop. The infamous RAM bug that plagued the S6 is indeed an annoyance on the Note 4’s 5.0.X ROMs. Rumors of an update to fix all of this were confirmed with the first reports of the 5.1.1 update for the Russian Note 4, which seemingly improved the Recents Menu and RAM management.

But it’ll be a long time before every region and every carrier variant receives this version, and until then, we are left with few ways to fix this. The Galaxy S6 saw its RAM management fixed with a simple build.prop edit. It turns out that the fix can be ported to the Note 4 as well, practically line-by-line, to achieve a very similar effect plus extra optimization. You can find a guide on how to do it on this XDA thread, which took after this Reddit thread. I suggest you read both threads before jumping in, but you will see that applying the fix is rather easy:

All you need is root and a build.prop editor, such as the one found on ROM Toolbox Lite. Alternatively, you can use other text editors to edit the build.prop. This fix has been confirmed to work on both the Snapdragon and Exynos variants (although with slightly different results) and on multiple ROMs, but nevertheless make sure to make a backup. Also, make sure to read both threads. After that, you should go into the editing mode of your build.prop editor and scroll down to the #DHA Properties section. There, you must edit this line like this:

ro.config.dha_empty_max=36

And then add the following:

ro.config.dha_cached_max=12

ro.config.dha_th_rate=2.3

ro.config.dha_lmk_scale=0.545

ro.config.sdha_apps_bg_max=70

ro.config.sdha_apps_bg_min=8

ro.config.oomminfree_high=7628,9768,11909,14515,16655,20469

If you do not have #DHA Properties nor any of the lines featured above, you can add all of the lines at the bottom of the file. Once you are done, hit the save button and reboot. Alternatively, XDA Senior Member Near_07 provided users with a flashable zip to make the process easier. I have tried both methods and they both worked flawlessly on my SM-910T running TEKodus ROM.

Users report two main benefits: 1. The Recents Menu opens up much, much faster.  and 2. The phone feels smoother overall. Now, we all know that there are many “placebo” build.prop edits out there, but I can vouch for this one: my Note 4’s Recents Menu opens up significantly faster and practically instantly, and the phone does seem a little smoother and faster than before. I can’t guarantee you the latter claim will be absolutely true for your device, but my experience matches those of the many users in the previously mentioned threads.

Finally, RAM management is claimed to be improved, but user reports suggest that it works better on the Exynos variants, and the SM-N910C seems to be the poster-boy of this fix. That being said, the tweak made my T-Mobile (Snapdragon) Note 4 slightly better, but I did not see significant benefits as far as keeping apps in memory goes (it still seems to only hold around 8 applications).

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