Why Unity has high memory usage on empty scene? (Android)

[abotrix]

No matter what I do or have in a unity project it says over a 100 mb is being used at any given time. I load the apk onto a Note 8 device and the running processes says 185 mb is being used. I ran empty scene with debugging mode attached to an Note 8 as well and in the profile it said it was using 11.3 mb. This is make my head explode as I can’t get any work done with such high memory usage on android.

If you look at the screen shots there is no object in the scene, no assets in the Asset folder and yet the scene takes 110.1 MB with (it says) 8 game objects in scene when there is none. Once I start to populate the scene with a few objects it quickly goes to 150 MB or more. This is insane. The only memory profile I really care about is once the app is on a Android device but Android reports memory usage much higher that what is shown on the Unity profiler.

Does anyone know whats going on? Am I reading everything correct? Can you reproduce this on a empty scene with your version of Unity. By the way, I’m using Unity 2017.3.0f3.

[pako]

I tried to replicate your setup/settings as much as possible, and I’m on Unity 2017.2.1 (new android project). See screenshots.

My figures are a bit lower, but not excessively lower e.g. total memory used 96MB vs 110MB, etc. Actually, total memory used started at about 90MB with default settings i.e. use VSync, Shading Mode “Shaded” instead of “Shaded Wireframe”, Directional Light in the scene, and rendering skybox. Then I changed these settings to replicate your project and memory went to 96MB.

So, given the differences in our PCs, I think your setup reflects pretty much what we are all working with.

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