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Originally, a2sd was developed to allow installation of many apps on G1 as G1 has limited memory. The MT3G has more internal memory so it does not need a2sd.
My question is if we can enable a2sd on a MT3G and than use the additional memory for the system. This can improve performance so much ....
Is this possible? I'm a dev, but not on this kind of platform . I know shell scripting, Unix, C so I can help if needed, but don't know how to approach this thing.
Thx.
mr.tenuki said:
Originally, a2sd was developed to allow installation of many apps on G1 as G1 has limited memory. The MT3G has more internal memory so it does not need a2sd.
My question is if we can enable a2sd on a MT3G and than use the additional memory for the system. This can improve performance so much ....
Is this possible? I'm a dev, but not on this kind of platform . I know shell scripting, Unix, C so I can help if needed, but don't know how to approach this thing.
Thx.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It depends. Now if you have a 32a board, this is pointless. Unless you have 300+apps installed it will not hurt performance.
I sugest App killer to kill off unused apps that never shut down, it helps so much/
Me really dont need Apsd for mytouch, especially the new 32a boards. Running from the sd card slows everythign down. To improve your performance..
1. Get CPU overclosk from market, set lowest to 386, high to 528 screen on, screen off 256/256.
2. Download swapper, set to size of yoru swap partition etc...
3. Get any free app killer ( ifully suggest Anvanced task killer) and every hour or so, go in and ignore what u use all the time, and kill everything else.
Also, get Cachemate from market or Clean up. this clears out all the garbage.
Doing this, on a good day, my battery lasts 17 hours with data going. and My Live wallpapers never lag
Hi,
Thanks - I already have all that set up. I was thinking on a MOD that will allow improvement of performance in a different way.
My Idea is to actually use the memory that becomes available under /data as we move the app to SD to be used by /system partition. Maybe we can also do a "reverse RAM hack" and increase the 3D RAM.
Again, as I'm not very familiar with the Linux system I don't know how exactly this should be done, or if it can be done at all.
Thanks for the reply though
storage memory in the phone is different then addressable ram.. therefore what your saying is not possible...if you really want something like this set up a swap partition on your sd card.
also task killers are not needed for android... its been well documented here and on other forums as android handles processes much differently than your standard windows box (so no need to have the mindset that background apps are slowing down your system). android itself does an excellent job of managing memory and kills tasks itself when more mem is needed. i used to run ATK myself, and found after removing it my phone actually ran better than killing processes all the time.
your likely just having a placebo affect if you think it speeds up your phone.. however killing process can increase battery life.. albeit only slightly...try it yourself and you will see what im talking about..
regarding task killers, just google it and you will see what im saying...
edit: most roms have cpu scaling in them, if you want an app i find set cpu to be the best, followed by overclock widget...
edit2: forgot to mention autostarts . a great program to edit which programs start up upon boot .. if your still worried about having things running in the background...
I was trying to get a swapfile on /Data (being a lot faster than sdcard, probably), but It didn't work :/
My Cappy starts with about 165mb of free RAM, but it quickly goes away as I use apps. I have Task Killer installed and set to kill apps every 30 minutes, but once I get down to about 90mb of RAM it is impossible to get anywhere near what I boot with free. I'm used to memory leakage on my WinMo phones, but this is way worse. I had CleanRAM on my Tilt 2 (from XDA) and it worked pretty good and allows scheduling. Is there a similar app for Android?
I'd get rid of Task Killer, you don't need it.
its not leaking memory...it handles memory differently than windows of yore....stop fretting about how much memory you have available and just reboot your phone once every few days....thats not needed, but if it makes you feel better to look at useless numbers...
Yeah you need to stop looking at this as either a windows pc or an old device (think g1). Get rid of the task killer and never look at how much free ram you have again. Its not important at all. I've had this phone for months and I literally have no idea how much ram it uses on average because I have never checked or cared. My phone has been running smooth since day one. Yours will too.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
Available RAM is a useless number? Having unused apps continue to run in the background is nothing to worry about?
Does anyone have anything usefull to respond with?
Miami_Son said:
Available RAM is a useless number? Having unused apps continue to run in the background is nothing to worry about?
Does anyone have anything usefull to respond with?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you look at Window 7, there is a concept called pre-fetch. This allows the OS to load the programs into memory based on past usage, and frequency of usage. This lets us open the program much faster, than fetch when requested. This info is loaded to memory, and kept there, until some other program comes in that needs more memory.
And just 'cos a program is present in RAM doesn't mean it would use CPU.
And, based on my observation of android, I see that I have close to 180 MB free when the phone boots up. But this quickly reduces to around 120-150 in less than an hour based on what I use. After like a day this I see that free RAM is about 80-120 MB. And even after 3-4 days of no reboots, the free memory is still present at the same 80-120 levels. I am not sure what kind of memory management android uses, but its very effective, and never caused any noticeable lag in the system.
And, I do not use any task killers, not free up RAM in task manager.
Your concerns are flawed in the fact that the Linux kernel handles memory different than what you are used to. Simply speaking, Linux keeps memory used by applications on need to basis. It keeps it loaded until something else needs to use it. It will take from something else at the required time. A system actually performs faster when there is less memory available because that means that applications are able to be recalled quicker. It's not like it can only load from what is left available.
You will also notice that many applications take up memory but are using 0 CPU. This speaks to the fact that it simply loaded into memory and not taking up resources required for other operations.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
Lot to learn about this Android, I see. So, why are there so many task killers on Market and other RAM-related programs if it is not important? Should I really not be concerned when I see a program I hardly use being shown as running on startup?
Miami_Son said:
Lot to learn about this Android, I see. So, why are there so many task killers on Market and other RAM-related programs if it is not important? Should I really not be concerned when I see a program I hardly use being shown as running on startup?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
When I got my android phone, the first thing I did was put up things like task killer, start up auditor, etc. But as weeks passed, I realized these were more of deteriorating performance, than improve it. So got rid of them. Android can handle itself.
Autokiller optimises memory by changing values in android rather than kills apps. I reccomemd it, definately makes the phone faster. Set it to agressive.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App
Miami_Son said:
Lot to learn about this Android, I see. So, why are there so many task killers on Market and other RAM-related programs if it is not important? Should I really not be concerned when I see a program I hardly use being shown as running on startup?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It started with the combination of old versions of android (think cupcake and doughnut) and phones like the G1. Older versions didn't handle ram as well as they do in eclair and up. If you combine this with the fact that those older phones had less ram, and likely didn't use any gpu acceleration (unsure of this though), then task killers and other programs were considered necessary to get a fluid feeling experience.
They are still in the market now for 2 reasons.
1. Because some people still have those old phones and still run old versions of android. (less likely)
2. Habit. If people are used to using them and tell others they are necessary because they've always worked, why would a developer pull his money making app from the market? (much more likely)
So when Pandora or Grooveshark freeze, which happens all the time, and leaves my phone utterly useless until they're done doing whatever it is they're doing, how is using a task killer to...kill the process...not useful? It's much faster than rebooting the phone. I also think it's much faster than going into each application's individual settings to use the 'force stop' command. Is there a different way to kill a stuck app other than these methods?
Miami_Son said:
My Cappy starts with about 165mb of free RAM, but it quickly goes away as I use apps. I have Task Killer installed and set to kill apps every 30 minutes, but once I get down to about 90mb of RAM it is impossible to get anywhere near what I boot with free. I'm used to memory leakage on my WinMo phones, but this is way worse. I had CleanRAM on my Tilt 2 (from XDA) and it worked pretty good and allows scheduling. Is there a similar app for Android?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Along with what everyone else said, remember that a memory leak is a LEAK, something that is continuously draining, not a one-time thing. So, if memory goes to 80MB free and holds, that's not a leak, that's simply memory that is being used. If free memory drops to 75, then 60, then 55, 50, 45, and so on, then you have a true leak to worry about.
Well, what we Windows Mobile users often also refer to as leaks is the bad habit of some apps to not release their memory when closed. For instance, a program that carves out 25mb of RAM when started and returns less then half of that when closed.
jaju123 said:
Autokiller optimises memory by changing values in android rather than kills apps. I reccomemd it, definately makes the phone faster. Set it to agressive.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Anyone else know much about "Autokiller"?
i used to use a task killer with my G1, and continued to do so with my captivate but i saw a few things like this: http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/ and decided to get rid of my task killers and my phone seemed actually a little faster and seemed my battery life increased.
matt310 said:
So when Pandora or Grooveshark freeze, which happens all the time, and leaves my phone utterly useless until they're done doing whatever it is they're doing, how is using a task killer to...kill the process...not useful? It's much faster than rebooting the phone. I also think it's much faster than going into each application's individual settings to use the 'force stop' command. Is there a different way to kill a stuck app other than these methods?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It is useful in those situations but realistically when people give that argument they are just looking for a reason to keep it. Android has the ability to kill tasks built in. If you're on 2.1 then yeah it's buried deeper in the menu but not a big deal. I can't imagine an app freezing enough to warrant having a task killer for. If you're on 2.2 it's much more easily accessible.
When we talk about task killers we're talking about people using them to kill open tasks that aren't causing issues simply to see more free ram available.
What is the verdict on these memory optimizer type apps?
http://andrs.w3pla.net/autokiller/faq
I can't recommend Autokiller highly enough on Samsung Froyo phones. It was a must use, even with Voodoo, on my old SGS i9000, and the same thing on my Droid Charge.
True story: just this morning I was ready to throw my Charge against the wall in frustration. Ever since upgrading to EE4 the damn thing was LAG LAG LAG city, even with Voodoo. Phone was snappy as heck after a reboot, but after a couple of hours use, it started to lag, and then would get so laggy it was almost unusable. Seriously, opening apps would take 10 second. Auto-rotate the screen took 4-5 seconds.
I enabled Autokiller, set it "aggressive" and the phone's a speed demon again.
Try it, can't hurt your phone with it, might help it exponentially.
waiting for the phones built in lowmem killer is useless, use autokiller and you will notice an immediate improvement in phone response time. heres a point for ya, without it installed i have 78mb ram free,,,with installed 158ram. thats huge. for a phone. plus they dev just updated to reduce memory usage of the app itself, plus there are tweaks in the settings menu to make the IO scheduler more aggressive, improve sd card reads, battery life, wifi, networ,...its layered man. and free....whats more to love. the only other way i have found to improve phone speed feelwise is with kangfucius kernel and set that terd up to 1500hz with cfq. shazaam.
elucid said:
What is the verdict on these memory optimizer type apps?
http://andrs.w3pla.net/autokiller/faq
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Basically what you're doing is tweaking the settings for how Android frees up your memory. In theory, it should be good, because the defaults that were picked with the Android release aren't going to be appropriate for everyone. Just be careful not to be too aggressive or you might start losing functionality you want, such as alarms or background email checks.
chadness said:
Basically what you're doing is tweaking the settings for how Android frees up your memory. In theory, it should be good, because the defaults that were picked with the Android release aren't going to be appropriate for everyone. Just be careful not to be too aggressive or you might start losing functionality you want, such as alarms or background email checks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Good point on not being too aggressive. The higher you set it, the more sticky sports ate pushed out of memory, so with the settings I have right now the phone kills some things that in the oat would have been running when I went back to them. I'm going to drop down from aggressive to strict and see if that's a better balance for how I use the phone.
Sent from my SCH-I510 using Tapatalk
Call me crazy but...
Android is linux based right? I.E. it uses a linux kernel? I was under the impression that was true. If so, unless you're running into the problem of completely filling RAM and having to wait for stuff to be cleared, this kind of thing will not help you!
Linux intentionally leaves commonly used items in RAM in order to decrease access time. It is perfectly normal for such a system to run at 70-80% memory usage. It is, in fact, a GOOD thing, because it means more memory is actually being put to a potentially useful purpose.
That being said, if you're actually running out of RAM I suppose something like this could help.
slight23 said:
Android is linux based right? I.E. it uses a linux kernel? I was under the impression that was true. If so, unless you're running into the problem of completely filling RAM and having to wait for stuff to be cleared, this kind of thing will not help you!
Linux intentionally leaves commonly used items in RAM in order to decrease access time. It is perfectly normal for such a system to run at 70-80% memory usage. It is, in fact, a GOOD thing, because it means more memory is actually being put to a potentially useful purpose.
That being said, if you're actually running out of RAM I suppose something like this could help.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, yes, I frequently give the "in linux free memory is wasted memory" whenever people want to use some taskkiller app because they want a lot of free memory. This isn't about shooting for some high free memory number because we're Windows minded and think we need a lot of free memory, this is about finding the right settings for Android's own memory manager to keep the phone responsive. There's been something about my Samsung phones (except the Nexus S) where they just get laggy as hell with the stock memory manager settings.
As described above, my phone was almost unusable after a couple of hours booted up until I enabled Autokiller. Maybe something I'm running has memory leak; could be, but I pretty much run the same apps on all my phones, and the HTCs and Nexus S don't get laggy like the i9000 and Charge do.
This app, or the one named MinFreeManager really help. In the early days of the i9000 on MoDaCo site we were using the cat command to tweak the settings manually in our efforts to find a way to stop RFS lag before Voodoo came along.
I just installed this yesterday and configured it for strict mode. I also enabled all of the advanced system tweaks and so far I haven't noticed much if any difference, perhaps it depends on your individual usage and what apps, launcher, etc you're using. I'm going to leave it on and see how it goes though.
Any still using this? Any want to share what settings they use?
Hi everyone,
I've been using my NS (not rooted) for 4 months straight without wiping the data on it, and now its reading and writing speed gets horribly slow. App updates become sluggish and sometimes fail, and some actions like searching contacts or moving apps from internal memory to sd now take much longer than they used to. Just wonder how I can fix this problem?
Thanks a lot!
Its possible your caches are quite large. 1-tap clean cache works good without root. Another possibility is your storage space is getting full. Unload some of that stuff onto a computer. Maybe you've got a boat load of apps installed. Uninstall stuff you don't use everyday or every other day. Maybe apps are slowing you down. There might be some cpu hogs or stuff that wants to run all the time. Another culprit is lots of small files in storage. When you boot, it scans the card and if there's lots of small files, its going to take awhile to scan them. Its doubtful but possible that the ram is going bad. That's my suggestions.
oscarthegrouch said:
Its possible your caches are quite large. 1-tap clean cache works good without root. Another possibility is your storage space is getting full. Unload some of that stuff onto a computer. Maybe you've got a boat load of apps installed. Uninstall stuff you don't use everyday or every other day. Maybe apps are slowing you down. There might be some cpu hogs or stuff that wants to run all the time. Another culprit is lots of small files in storage. When you boot, it scans the card and if there's lots of small files, its going to take awhile to scan them. Its doubtful but possible that the ram is going bad. That's my suggestions.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the reply oscarthegrouch! I usually clean app cache once in a while and the internal/external storage is only about 50% full. I think the problem might be that I installed many apps and always did app2sd when possible, which could create a lot of small files. I tried cut-and-paste the stuff on the external storage (as some sort of defragmentation) but it didn't really boost up the speed. And since my phone is not rooted I can't access the internal storage.
P.S. I installed way more apps on my iTouch and it didn't slow down like my NS. Got no idea why this whole problem is happening...
maybe it's a free memory issue ?
my device is always busy with kswapd0 and runs very slow than.
This may be a general question for all android devices or not but I was curious about adding swap space to this device. It has 1 gig of ram and many may consider that to be enough, and it might be. I have cyanogenmod 10.2 installed and tried to enable zram, 10% seems to be the best setting as anthing higher caused a game to pop up a notice saying something about low memory and defaulting to lower values. When I checked to see if zram was used however it turns out it was, about 25mb - 34mb after booting. The issue with zram is when multitasking with lecturenotes and moonreader, The tablet would reboot and my notebook that was open in lecturenotes would be missing notes I took or the settings would be greatly messed up, or both. This was with 10%.
I am thinking since it was used, it might be helpful to have an sd card for this reason, to aid in multitasking. This is important to me because I run several apps at once (I wish cyanogenmod had multi windows, and google wouldn't threaten over it). So the question is will there be a benifit to buying an sd card on ebay (class 10 of course) and using it as swap space. It seems this tablet might be on the cusp of the memory being enough. Also I am thinking this might help to future proof it a bit when updating to newer releases of gyanogenmod. The sd card I was thinking of is 4 gigs and may plan on having 1gb swap space (this tablet is for school and other work). The tablet has 32gb storage and that is more than enough for me (I am only using 3gb of space) so I wont need to add anymore storage.
I should also add that when multitasking without zram enabled, the tablet reboots less but still has done it, and so far nothing has been lost in my notebooks. I am thinking that the memory of 1gb is starting to reach its limit, with no apps running I am consuming about 600mbs of it.
vanquishedangel said:
This may be a general question for all android devices or not but I was curious about adding swap space to this device. It has 1 gig of ram and many may consider that to be enough, and it might be. I have cyanogenmod 10.2 installed and tried to enable zram, 10% seems to be the best setting as anthing higher caused a game to pop up a notice saying something about low memory and defaulting to lower values. When I checked to see if zram was used however it turns out it was, about 25mb - 34mb after booting. The issue with zram is when multitasking with lecturenotes and moonreader, The tablet would reboot and my notebook that was open in lecturenotes would be missing notes I took or the settings would be greatly messed up, or both. This was with 10%.
I am thinking since it was used, it might be helpful to have an sd card for this reason, to aid in multitasking. This is important to me because I run several apps at once (I wish cyanogenmod had multi windows, and google wouldn't threaten over it). So the question is will there be a benifit to buying an sd card on ebay (class 10 of course) and using it as swap space. It seems this tablet might be on the cusp of the memory being enough. Also I am thinking this might help to future proof it a bit when updating to newer releases of gyanogenmod. The sd card I was thinking of is 4 gigs and may plan on having 1gb swap space (this tablet is for school and other work). The tablet has 32gb storage and that is more than enough for me (I am only using 3gb of space) so I wont need to add anymore storage.
I should also add that when multitasking without zram enabled, the tablet reboots less but still has done it, and so far nothing has been lost in my notebooks. I am thinking that the memory of 1gb is starting to reach its limit, with no apps running I am consuming about 600mbs of it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well in my own personal testing i could not see any benefit while extracting 700mb archives under android with 4gb swap space on a 40mbs microsd card, while under full linux desktop with a same workload, swap differently helps keep the system smooth under heavy io load. The conclusion i drew was the android platform deals to memory management differently than the typical desktop os, due to slower emmc chips used as a boot disk for the majority of android devices using this slow, already bottlenecked memory as swap space doesn't make sense (not to mention the use of 2gb swap space on a limited 16gb storage etc), so android runs almost completely in ram, with stricter memory management and allocation allows android to run fine without swap space, although because of this, androids memory management makes little uses of available swap space
JoinTheRealms said:
Well in my own personal testing i could not see any benefit while extracting 700mb archives under android with 4gb swap space on a 40mbs microsd card, while under full linux desktop with a same workload, swap differently helps keep the system smooth under heavy io load.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've been running my desktop without swap for the last 10 years, and as long as you have enough RAM for all your running programs, there will be no problem at all.
Extracting an archive is a mostly sequential operation (single read stream, single write stream), so it also doesn't benefit from caching, which could use the memory that is freed by swapping.
_that said:
I've been running my desktop without swap for the last 10 years, and as long as you have enough RAM for all your running programs, there will be no problem at all.
Extracting an archive is a mostly sequential operation (single read stream, single write stream), so it also doesn't benefit from caching, which could use the memory that is freed by swapping.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ahh that makes sense. I wasnt sure if swap had an effect directly on the extraction, but seem keeped the rest system more stable/ smooth duing the process in the case of GNU/Linux, with swap off similar operations such as installing packages would more oftern lock the tablet up. Might be a placebo though
I also dont set swap on my Linux desktop, as it has plenty of ram but the benitfit of swap space is somewhat more noticable due to the lack of ram on the tf700.
JoinTheRealms said:
I also dont set swap on my Linux desktop, as it has plenty of ram but the benitfit of swap space is somewhat more noticable due to the lack of ram on the tf700.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just want to share my user experiences on the swap space... It does seem to improve the tf700 with swap space due to the lack of RAM (1GB)..
Thanks for all the useful posts
Thanks for all the posts, I have my sd card on the way. I will post my experience when I get my sd card but I am sure it is safe to say there will be a benefit. I use linux to at home and have 8 gigs of ram on that computer, I lessen the swap after install to about 512mb because 8 gigs is more then enough. I leave some however just incase of any issues like ram going bad. On another computer in the house that has limited ram (1.5 gigs) I have enabled zram (384 mb) and added two old flash cards (1 gig each) to a pci raid card and those were converted to swap. I then altered the fstab to reflect the order of priority I wanted them used in. The reason is that when the swap is used from the hard drive, and the hard drive is being written to, can cause a slow down. So with the 2 flash cards at 1 gig each (the swap seen as 2 gigs) it seemed to speed it up. I just posted that because of the nix users and it seemed like a good plan to run it that way.
Ok, got the sd card
So I recieved the sd card today and applied the swap space to it using root swapper (max setting is 256mb, I figured i can find a way to increase it later if I need to). The defaut location in many of the swap applications will not work on this device however, the sd card mounts at /storage/sdcard1 in my case. So it has to be entered manually (might just be cyanogenmod). Also the device was picky when insalling the card, it would only say blank sd card or cannot read filesystem. I had to install the card in the dock, format it from cwm recovery, (vfat if I remember correct, ext2 and ntfs had issues, avoided ext3 and ext4 cause journaling will cause more wear and tear).
The sd card is a scandisk ultra sdhc uhs-1 8 gigs. From my research that is the fastest this tab can handle. I also use optimising programs like greenify (epic save everything app), pimp my rom (almost every tweak applied), and some pretty efficient tweaks in the settings as well. I also have HALO))) installed and working (epic multiwindow app that works with native programs and almost any rom).
The resuts:
I tested it many ways, I rebooted to see use (none was used because swap starts after boot), I opened apps normally (browsers and things), and it showed 9kb's was used. I then put it to the tests, I open four windows in halo, these were youtube, moonreader pro with a pdf ebook, lecturenotes (awsome note and handwriting app with tons of functions), and Supernote pro (not the best note app). Constantly switched between the apps and messed with settings with them open. The max of swap used was around 10mb(keeping in mind that when I switch windows the app(s) I leave get paused making it hard to tell actual usage because I had to swith the terminal and type "free". I then ran antutu bechmark and gpubench (my tab stills score pretty well) and got a little higher swap usage but not much.
As for the feel of it, it seemed to help when opening many windows in halo, this is the primary reason for my doing this. As for other more normal uses I really didnt see too much of a difference, I did test games however and they did seem a little better (could be placebo) but I am not really sure why they would except android cached other apps to free memory. Reopening apps seemed faster. Also because of apps like greenify my memory usage is decreased so I am sure typically swap would have seen more use.
The conclusion is that at this point I really didn't notice much of a boost for any normal use, but I will definately keep the swap space on due to the boost when using halo and not to mention that I will be updating to android 4.4 soon and it might need more memory. Swap at this point seems more like a pre emptive strike, but it does help with multitasking.
about swap
://androidforums.com/boost-mobile-warp-all-things-root/610449-ram-swapping-without-swapper2.html I actually followed a guide on android central and redid the swap file to 1 gig to swap instead of using a program, this worked better. (add http in front), when i disabled swap it was noticeable that there was a boost. then reenabled it this method.