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Advice please - need more speed!!

Hi, I've started this thread to get some advice from the members who are experienced in modding their phones.
As lots of G1 owners did, I greedily installed app after app until i was running low on space and ended up getting rid of a load. By this time my phone was running slowly anyway.
After recently playing with JF 1.5 then going to the official cupcake release, i have now only installed 24 apps and have 60mb free internal memory - so plenty of space for the browser/maps/youtube caches to grow.
My problem is understanding exactly how the system works though. How can I force each app to continue running in the background until I go back to it?
When first opening an app it takes anything from 0.5sec (dialer) to 17sec (maps) to go from the initial blank screen to actually drawing the app interface on the screen. This is fine when you first use an app, and if you go home then back to the app this is pretty much instant because the app is still running.
My problem however is the small number of apps the system allows to keep running before closing them, it only seems to be about 4 or so, and when you reopen an app you used a little while ago then you have to go through the painfully slow initial waiting while the app interface is drawn on the screen.
My questions really then are:
1. How many apps does the system keep running, and can this be increased? If so, then how & at what price?
2. Is there a way to force the system to always keep certain apps running and not close them (apps I use repeatedly througout the day, such as gmail, chompsms, browser)? I want the instant snappiness all the time for these apps.
3. Can I force the system to close other memory/processor hog apps as soon as I finish using them (maps, youtube, gallery)?
4. Will moving my apps and dalvik cache to a really fast class 8 microsd card help the speed of my phone in any way? Or is this just a way to increase free space on my phone memory?
Thanks in advance for any answers/advice/help!

17 sec for map? Something is wrong. I just opened my map and it took 2 sec to open up the map, another 1 sec to get my rough location. I was inside so I can't comment on getting exact GPS location but, if I had to guess, usually it's about 4-5 sec to lock onto that.
Now onto your question: Android manages it's own memory and there's no way of telling it how to manage it. You can do couple of things:
1) Get an "Open Overclocker" and increase the speed of you CPU to 384/528Mhz from stock 284/384Mhz
2) Get "Task Manager for root users" which will let you shut down programs that you don't use.
3) Reduce the number of widgets you have installed. In my experience, all of the news widgets run in the background even if you don't have them on your screen.
4) Clear you caches regularly (once a day). Very important.
5) Reboot your phone once a day.
Good luck.

borodin1 said:
17 sec for map? Something is wrong. I just opened my map and it took 2 sec to open up the map, another 1 sec to get my rough location. I was inside so I can't comment on getting exact GPS location but, if I had to guess, usually it's about 4-5 sec to lock onto that.
Now onto your question: Android manages it's own memory and there's no way of telling it how to manage it. You can do couple of things:
1) Get an "Open Overclocker" and increase the speed of you CPU to 384/528Mhz from stock 284/384Mhz
2) Get "Task Manager for root users" which will let you shut down programs that you don't use.
3) Reduce the number of widgets you have installed. In my experience, all of the news widgets run in the background even if you don't have them on your screen.
4) Clear you caches regularly (once a day). Very important.
5) Reboot your phone once a day.
Good luck.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've just opened my map again after rebooting the phone (and ensuring wifi is switched on, so there's no delay in downloading data for the map) and it took 7sec from hitting the icon until i had a map drawn on my screen. So perhaps the 17 sec was a one off. Even still, it feels painfully slow.
I will look into rooting my phone, and the over clocking and the TaskManager.
The only widgets i have installed are the google search bar, and a playlist.
Any thoughts on moving my apps/dalvik cache to a fast sd card? I think i read somewhere that a class 6 sd card is about the same speed as the internal memory in the G1, so would a class 8 card be even faster than this with regard to loading apps up?
Thanks for your advice so far!

There are multiple discussions about that and at this point it sounds like it does not matter where you caches are in terms of speed. Don't ask me why, I'm not that tech savy. Most people move caches to save space and to avoid clearing them every day. The beauty of this is that you can try it out and go back if you think it's not for you.
Also... look into what apps do you have on your phone, some of them may bog down system significantly. I know for sure that Phonebook from VoxMobile will, there are few others, can't remember which though, look for the thread about it from couple of months ago.
Good luck.

Thanks borodin1!

You do realize, unless the section of the map is cached, it has to be downloaded over your wireless connection right? (and cell networks has a very long latency.)
As to your questions 1-3, all running tasks are managed by the android system and non-active ones are terminated if memory is required by an active program. You cannot control this, but you can kill running apps if you want.
Also due to the slow nature of the terrible dalvik VM, you can't get much performance improvement by moving the dalvik-cache. I suppose you can get some boost by increasing the CPU speed, but the battery life will be much shorter.

billc.cn said:
You do realize, unless the section of the map is cached, it has to be downloaded over your wireless connection right? (and cell networks has a very long latency.)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Which is why people move caches to the card and don't have that problem

but the map app does not use /cache. the latter is designed for non-transient temporary storage, not for big chunks of junk like the map.

[Q] Android Market & Music Player Slow?

The android market on my captivate is slow, it'll take anywhere from 15-25 seconds to load a page sometimes. Also my music player is sluggish, I only have about 300 songs on there right now and the player lags a little bit. Anyone else having these problems?

I also face the same problem with android market.
Any application takes a while to start installing, sometimes even upto 10-15 mins for the installation to start.
I reset my phone to factory settings a couple of times before and still this problem exists.
I know this may sound a bit crazy, i think the GPS malfunction on this device has got to be somehow connected with all the lag.. (Most of the applications required your current location, and maybe the GPS gets activated or something like that).
I know it may sound lame, am not a software guy, but i am just thinking that it may be the case!

Same for me with the Android Market lag... of course my GPS too but that's a given :-(
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

hmm, i dont use the music player (pandora ftw) but i do use the market quite a bit. I havn't noticed any page loading lag (this could be due to you reception) but now that i've hit 50 apps, when i install new ones, the phone has a brain fart while its installing and becomes generally slower untill the install completes. However downloads and installs dont take any longer than normal...

yeah my installing is fine, it's just when i try to load pages. Sometimes it'll take 15-20 seconds to load the page and it's quite annoying. I tried clearing the cache from manage applications settings but that didn't do much.
wheres FROYO!!!!!!!!!

Simple solution that helped for me on several phones.
Exit all applications.
Go to Settings => Accounts & Sync => Uncheck Background Data and confirm
Quit all screens with back button
Start Market => You will receive a message that Market can't run without Background Data => click Activate => Enable Background Data and click the back button
Now test Market again
Enjoy!

If you are rooted the OCLF helps this issue immensely. I had it installed and just uninstalled the OCLF to see if there was any difference in load times and I'm ready to reinstall, it helps out a lot!

[Q] Sluggishness building over time ?

Hey guys,
I have my Nexus S (9023 variant) for some good 4 months now and I'm still quite happy with it!
Running unrooted stock 2.3.4 version.
However, I seem to feel like the phone is getting a bit jerkier / sluggish than it used to be before. I've noticed an increase in battery consumption of the Android OS process (not the system one) as opposed to before (like in a 100%-0% charge, it used to be 1-2 minutes, now it can go up to 10 mins time usage).. Sometimes going from one app to the other seems to have a noticeable lag. Sometimes the Google Music player is just slow to start playing... sometimes even the swiping of the home screens dies.
Also I used to have 2 days battery life and now some 1.5 days (which forces me to charge every night).
I would suspect than an increase on the Androis OS process would mean an increase in internal task switching.
How can one alleviate the problem ? Is there a way to sort of "cleanup" the system ? Does it degrade over time needing a factory reset or something ? I have some applications installed (some of them I hardly use though) but I suspect that even though those optimizations have their notifications disabled, they can be reacting to some kind of low-level OS events..
Anyway thanks for any thoughts guys!

What ROM are you running? And I would suspect that apps are the main problem if it persists after a reboot.

Stock 2.3.4, unrooted
Guess it's on to uninstall some apps then

Factory reset would solve all your problems I assume. Pity you are not rooted so you can back up your ROM.

I'm actually thinking of rooting soon, because I made some video recordings in a concert and they were plain horrible (distorted). So I might try to install a kernel with voodoo.
I guess I can always manually backup for once...
I have the google services backup activated... doesn't it mean that I can restore all my apps after a factory reset ?

https://market.android.com/details?id=tw.nicky.CleanCache
You can use that to clean up your caches. I suspect a lot of programs installed or one or a few that are pulling your performance down. You could go about this in a few different ways. One is to uninstall everything you've downloaded from the market. That should give you a boost. Or you can start uninstalling programs one at a time until you see your performance increase then that's your culprit. Another idea is to delete all your SMS, MMS, and voicemail. I've seen people with hundreds of texts that after deleting them, notice an improvement.

A cache and dalvic cache wipe would help speed things up. Hopefully that market app above can do both. Normally done through a custom recovery.
Sent from my Nexus S 4G using xda premium

read this http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1231840&highlight=slow+crawl
it'll give you good ideas on how to make it faster again
mindwalkr said:
Hey guys,
I have my Nexus S (9023 variant) for some good 4 months now and I'm still quite happy with it!
Running unrooted stock 2.3.4 version.
However, I seem to feel like the phone is getting a bit jerkier / sluggish than it used to be before. I've noticed an increase in battery consumption of the Android OS process (not the system one) as opposed to before (like in a 100%-0% charge, it used to be 1-2 minutes, now it can go up to 10 mins time usage).. Sometimes going from one app to the other seems to have a noticeable lag. Sometimes the Google Music player is just slow to start playing... sometimes even the swiping of the home screens dies.
Also I used to have 2 days battery life and now some 1.5 days (which forces me to charge every night).
I would suspect than an increase on the Androis OS process would mean an increase in internal task switching.
How can one alleviate the problem ? Is there a way to sort of "cleanup" the system ? Does it degrade over time needing a factory reset or something ? I have some applications installed (some of them I hardly use though) but I suspect that even though those optimizations have their notifications disabled, they can be reacting to some kind of low-level OS events..
Anyway thanks for any thoughts guys!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Nice ideas guys!!
Think I will try to install titanium backup and backup my apps. And since I'm on it, I will also root my phone and install the net archy kernel cause the last time I took my phone to a concert I ended up with 1 hour of unusable footage due to sound issues.

[Q] Out of Memory

Stock, unrooted, still locked, as it came from the factory One S:
Do you ever find that when you close an app and go back to the launcher (Rosie), Rosie has been purged from memory and needs to reload? Takes about 10 seconds with the "loading" animation before you can do anything. Pretty poor really for a standard setup. Will be rooting at the weekend, but any other tips to stop this happening?

kuroneko007 said:
Stock, unrooted, still locked, as it came from the factory One S:
Do you ever find that when you close an app and go back to the launcher (Rosie), Rosie has been purged from memory and needs to reload? Takes about 10 seconds with the "loading" animation before you can do anything. Pretty poor really for a standard setup. Will be rooting at the weekend, but any other tips to stop this happening?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
setting-power untick fastboot

Yes I have also seen this a few times, especially if I had a lot of tabs open in the browser then go back to the home screen.

the only time i got this, was when i was disabling bloatware apps in settings

speaking of memory, I have total memory of 701160kb, with 34684kb free according to vellamo system info. is this correct? I thought we should have 1GB of ram??

The system always allocates a certain amount for normal operating

unclespoon said:
The system always allocates a certain amount for normal operating
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
exactly what i also thought, but presumed when it says total it included the system usage.

kuroneko007 said:
Stock, unrooted, still locked, as it came from the factory One S:
Do you ever find that when you close an app and go back to the launcher (Rosie), Rosie has been purged from memory and needs to reload? Takes about 10 seconds with the "loading" animation before you can do anything. Pretty poor really for a standard setup. Will be rooting at the weekend, but any other tips to stop this happening?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Without a proper analysis of what happened, It's quite difficult to say if this is a right behaviour of Android. Android handles the memory itself, because it is based on JAVA. When an application needs more memory, Android tries to allocate to it, sometimes this could mean taking away the memory of Rosie (homescreen) if it is needed.
This could happen regardless how many memory you have. In theory if you run a lot of apps at the same time without closing them, Android may do so. So no need to worry if this was what happened to you. However, if it happens a lot even if you don't have big apps running at background, it may indicate something is not quite right. I don't know what it would be cos this is IMO at the software level so should happen to everyone and be a potential bug.
Rooting the phone and removing bloatware may be benefitial cos you get rid of lots of annoying background tasks which take x amount of memory.

Im also having this problem.
I tryed close all apps, now its 618 used and 67 mb free.
In the list (under apps - running) only few apps are listed, and they make only total of ~95mb, where are other 500 used?
After reboot +- same apps showed, only using 100mb and toatly 350used 340free...

What kind of phones do you guys have? Branded and locked by operator?
Sent from my HTC One S using XDA

Messed up Android 11 v3.0 upgrade last night on AT&T

Last night, my Note 20 Ultra got the Android 11 v3 upgrade, and it messed up so many things I can't believe anybody would call that an "upgrade".
First, the option to hide the front camera hole in Settings / Full screen apps is GONE, and now that hole is not only back, but since there is no more bevel, it's extremely difficult again to swipe down on an Otterbox case because of the slightly protruding edge protecting the screen.
Second, the alarm sounds have been changed. Having a couple dozen alarms active makes it a hassle to change everything again.
Third, the photo editing software now has added shadow buttons shifting the saturation button farther to the right out of the default space, therefore requiring scrolling. I believe this can be customized, but why not add these 2 new lesser used options to the right from the get going ?
Fourth, looking at pictures in the gallery now shows a thumbnail scroll at the bottom which interferes with basic button functions, especially video playing control.
I've only noticed a few other minor changes today, like changes in the location of various options, but these are the most irritating so far.
I hope the next upgrade will at least bring back the option to hide the camera hole again for those who need it.

Nothing like an AT&T update... which is why I never let updates run.
If you like the OS and it's fast/stable, leave it be.
A reload is probably needed, at the least clear the system cache.
Major firmware upgrades are going to require a lot of time and learning even if they're good OS's. Just the nature of the beast.

blackhawk said:
Nothing like an AT&T update... which is why I never let updates run.
If you like the OS and it's fast/stable, leave it be.
A reload is probably needed, at the least clear the system cache.
Major firmware upgrades are going to require a lot of time and learning even if they're good OS's. Just the nature of the beast.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I never had a problem before, and I cleared the system cache just in case, but the phone is working fine.
I am fine learning new features and virtually all OS changes, but I don't see how removing the option to disable full screen can be an improvement.
Is there any way to restore the OS to a previous version without wiping out data and apps ? It's very difficult to swipe down 20 times a day now that the fullscreen can't be disabled.

maxpat98607 said:
I never had a problem before, and I cleared the system cache just in case, but the phone is working fine.
I am fine learning new features and virtually all OS changes, but I don't see how removing the option to disable full screen can be an improvement.
Is there any way to restore the OS to a previous version without wiping out data and apps ? It's very difficult to swipe down 20 times a day now that the fullscreen can't be disabled.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Never update near the end of the phone's life cycle. That when the worst things tend to happen and some are deliberately done... thanks AT&T Feel the wuv...
If you want to flash back you'll need to reload.
A reload is a good idea even if you don't and I rarely advocate reloading.
I use my SD card as the data drive. Nothing critical is on the OS drive. I back all my user apps and system app updates with ApkExport. I can fully reload with little or internet and no PC in about 2 hrs. At that point it's about 95% complete.
Starting experimenting with Smart Switch backup; the above timeframe is without Smart Switch restoring settings (time will tell). Make frequent backups to it.
Take advantage of the tools you have available and be ready to reload at any time. Forced reloads are rare but can happen at any time.
Being prepared makes them a lot less time consuming, painful and eliminates most data loss.
After spending over a year getting to know Pie and how to optimize this 10+ variant, I refuse to "upgrade" this fast, stable and secure* platform that I like. It be a waste of time and in my opinion Q is inferior to Pie.
You on the other hand started on Q so up is the only way to go; that may be a better route for you.
You probably will find solutions for your current issues but it's a time consuming process.
Just the nature of the beast.
Play with it... Android's are fun to play with
*as secure as you make it or not.
Goggle is one fat slob of a big sister... don't trust her. AT&T is even worse.