Recently, one of our customers experienced problems using the FormConnect app in that it would crash as soon as he tried to open his form. It was not obvious as to why the app was crashing until we did a little more investigating. Below are some of the things we discovered.
1. The form contained 72 pages.
2. There were approximately 35 to 50 photos in every completed form (record).
3. There were 850 records.
4. He was using an iPad 2 to store his records.
The first step to identify the problem was to determine the size of a single record. One record was approximately 9 MB in size. This was primary due to the number of photos taken. When we multiplied the 850 records by 9MB, the size of the database equated to approximately 7.2 GB. We then looked at the iPad 2 to determine how much RAM (memory) it contained 512KB, and we had our answer. The iPad 2 couldn’t process a 7.2 GB file with that amount of RAM. It wasn’t sufficient. The solution was to upgrade to a newer iPad that had more RAM.
Below is a list of every iPad ever sold and their RAM configurations. If you find that the FormConnect app is slowing down, it could be because your database has grown and your older iPad can’t process all of your records anymore.
iPad 1 – 256KB
iPad 2 – 512 KB
iPad 3 – 1 MB
iPad 4 – 1 MB
iPad Air – 1 MB
iPad Air 2 – 2 MB
iPad 5 – 2 MB
iPad 6 – 2 MB
iPad Pro (9.7 inch) – 2 MB
iPad Pro (10.5 inch) – 4 MB
iPad Pro (12.9 inch) – 4 MB