Performance on the iPhone 3GS and 3rd generation iPod Touch is fantastic; with twice as much RAM and a much more advanced processor, slowdowns have become a thing of the past. But what about those of us who are still using “old school” hardware, such as the iPhone 3G or (dare I say it) original iPhone? Often, apps can become sluggish, even crash, due to the lack of RAM. While a significant increase in performance will not be possible until the iPhones CPU can be unlocked and “overclocked”, you can marginally increase performance and prevent significant slowdowns using swap memory.

Swap memory is used on all operating systems- Linux, Mac, Windows, etc. When the computer begins running out of RAM, it begins writing unused or seldom used code to a file or partition on the hard drive, freeing up memory for other, more immediate needs; this file or partition is referred to as “swap” on Mac and Linux, and as the “pagefile” on Windows.