[ianuk2005]

The lack of ram on the fire stick makes a huge difference, by the time kodi's booted mine has less than 100mb, this isn't enough to display the EPG or playback live tv smoothly. It also runs out of RAM and force closes even displaying a relatively small library.

1GB just isn't enough for a lot of users who have large librarys. My main x86 box with openelec and 2GB ram even runs out regularly when trying to scroll through my movie library which is around 1500. Kodi just doesn't handle displaying a large library of posters well enough it seems to retain everything you scroll through in memory and doesn't release it when resources get too low. Instead it just crashes.

The only reason i've stayed away from wetek boxes is the lack of RAM, I would love the new s2 but i'm still unsure as only having a 2GB option is still lacking when you compare it to your upgrade options on x86 hardware.

It might not matter for the majority of users but RAM makes a huge difference as you scale up and the more options they include for it the more users they will get.

The Fire TV stick does not have 1GB of RAM. It only has 512MB of RAM. I have never had Kodi crash due to running out of RAM on a 1GB box. It really shouldn't happen even with 512, either. The Fire TV stick also uses Fire OS, which for all I know uses more RAM than other Android versions, especially official Androis TV devices.

Yes, it is possible for people with huge libraries and large fanart will see smoother scrolling with more RAM. People will also see smoother scrolling with a faster CPU. I'm not talking about edge cases or "would be nice" cases. I'm sure an i7 will render raindrop ripples on the Kodi home screen much better than any ARM chip, but saying Kodi requires that is nonsense.

If someone needs a more demanding machine then they should buy one. One size will never fit all. They sell a box with 1GB of RAM, but there's also an upgraded version with 2GB of RAM. Live TV is likely the biggest use case for more RAM. Users needing more performance than that should look to the top-of-the-line Shield TV or the x86 platform options. Still, that is different than saying something absurd like "Kodi needs 2GB or more RAM". That is factually incorrect.

EDIT: I don't mean to be a hard-ass on this. Sorry if this is coming off too strong. It's a fair debate point, and all in good fun

Of course i'm not saying Kodi requires more than 1GB to run, my point is that it can and will go past 1GB or even 2GB depending on the scale of peoples libraries and what functionality they use. This unfortunately results in crashing normally on linux and android.

Options to have more RAM would be nice on what is otherwise a perfect all in one Kodi DVR.

I'd be happy to do the maintanence if this can make a difference as now even my nvidia shield tv is starting to struggle scrolling through the library of posters as it eats up RAM for fun.

A Shield TV should not have any issues with scrolling 2,000 or 5,000 or even 10,000 posters in Kodi. I think there is a larger issue going on here.

I agree it should not, Kodi doesn't seem to use any pooling for the memory and allocates space for every single poster/fanart. This doesn't get deallocated once it's off screen, when memory get's low or even when you exit the menu entirely. This is purely speculation as i've never gone through the code but it's the likely explanation as RAM usage goes up per poster scrolled and never reduces.

I'd put it down to a weird edge case but it happens on all my devices across different OS's and they all use the official release builds. It would be nice if someone with knowledge of the codebase could chime in and clear up what might be causing the issue.