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.

By default, swap memory is disabled on the iPhone. To enable it, you can install “iMemory Enhancer” from our Cydia repo.

Alternatively, you can enable swap memory manually. First, download this .plist file; then, SSH in to your device and copy it to /System/Library/LaunchDaemons. After you do this, reboot your device and it will be activated; things should be running smoother now, and you’ll probably have a constant 30 or 40 megabytes of free RAM.

Obviously, it won’t work if you have little or no room on your device. Also, doing this won’t show any improvement on an iPhone 3GS or iPod Touch 3rd generation because of the increased amount of RAM and faster CPU. If you find that there is actually a *decrease* in performance, simply remove the package from Cydia. Alternatively, you can SSH in to your device and remove the .plist file. Either way, be sure to reboot, and your device will run just like it did before.