The phone ran perfectly stable for three days now, no reboots. I set everything up (2 email accounts, Voice, Weather, Stocks, Facebook, etc), as much as I could to test the memory usage during this time. After three days of usage, at idle the phone had 12MB of RAM free, still enough to do what I want (it doesn't appear to be leaking as it stops at 12MB, just Sense/Windows must be caching a lot, probably up to a limit). I reboot the phone for the first time (not really needed, I was just testing memory usage), and it was back up to 32MB after a reboot. Some users might not be happy with this setup, it does limit how many applications you can have open at once, but it is very usable, better than even most 'lite' roms out there now.
Some tricks that seem to work well at saving the memory. Disable the Sense tabs you don't use or can live without, some of them take up a lot of memory, and once they use it, they don't seem to give it back. Here is my quick list of how much memory can be saved with each tab (not exact, some runs produced different results, these are the best averages I could get):
- Calendar 2.2MB
- Messages 0.2MB
- Mail: 0.2MB
- Weather: 2.4MB
- Stocks: 1.2MB
- Internet: 0.2MB
- Contacts: 1.1MB
- Photos: 5.1MB
- Music: 5.1MB
After disabling a few things on the phone I don't use anyways I am able to keep my idle memory around 22MB, which works for me. What kind of 'tricks' go into making a 'lite' rom? I have plenty of storage space, just the RAM is limiting, so I am happy with the full rom and just a few tweaks
I will continue my research on limiting the RAM usage, perhaps there are some registry tweaks for caching values and whatnot that can squeeze just a little more RAM. Most Verizon TP users would (I think...) be happy if I could get 5 or so more MB sitting at idle.