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Originally Posted by Steffen
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That is absolutely untrue.
It is easy to check with a jailbroken iPad. A command called 'top' (familiar to linux / Unix users) shows that the apps which are in the 'task bar' are loaded in memory (but not running). Here a screenshot of an SSH terminal session to the iPad with top running.
A non-JB iPad cannot check this because Apple does not allow apps which intervene with the system.
See the attached images regarding 'Wordfeud' and 'AppStore'.
These apps do consume memory and thus slow down performance. As you see the 'dormant' Appstore consumes 38MB and Wordfeud 186MB. This is under most OSes particuarly Android and iOS. Windows, Linux and Mac OSX have swap space on the harddisk where such apps are swapped out of 'live' memory.
Moreover unlike these three and Android, iOS does not really multitask: many apps suspend when moved to the background. This is not a limitation of iOS but a design choice of Apple to prevent too much battery usage, like the closed nature of iOS is.
So the real misconception is:
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You may think that, if an app is resident in memory, you have to somehow remove it to conserve memory. You don't because iOS does it for you. If there are Suspended apps lying around and you launch a memory-intensive app such as a big game, iOS will start to purge Suspended apps and move them to the Not Running state. That is, they will be completely removed from memory and will launch afresh the next time you tap their icon.
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