i am not that person

if a device is trying to render graphics and is hitting its ram limit, the OS is constantly going to be dumping any process it can to make room for the task at hand. this takes some time.

what the exact amount of ram being utilized to render menus and whatnot is, i have no clue. but this is exactly how it can happen. this is particularly going to be more common in phones(as opposed to desktops etc) because phones have no dedicated vram, everything is shared.

i recently observed this while playing minecraft. for whatever reason my java client was set to only use 1gb of ram... i have 16gb. i was flying around extremely fast and i was getting absurd amounts of FPS lag. i noticed that as i was flying, my ram utilization was going from ~500mb, to ~1000mb, then lagging, then dumping older parts of the world from ram to make room for what i was trying to load, and repeating over and over.

i set the ram limit to 8gb and while it did not need to utilize all 8 gb, it was going from the ~500mb, to about 1.5gb, then dumping old loaded chunks of the world and repeating over and over, but with no lag because i was never hitting the ram limiter.

whether or not the pixel 2 is lagging because of a low amount of ram,cheap ufs 2.1 storage, or optimization of the ROM used is an entirely different question. but it is easily possible that shitty optimization and ram utilization is causing dropped frames.