RAM limitation on non-Pro configuration - Xiaomi Redmi 3 Questions & Answers

Hi, I heard MIUI reserves 1GB+ for itself. Can any of non-Pro version owners report 2GB RAM sufficiency for common operation (multitasking, running user apps in background etc.). How much complexity the present memory allows? Is killing apps in background frequent? How about lagging?
Is there any real performance comparison between Pro and non-Pro configuration?
And finally is it worth to drop ~$30 more for Pro version (as about phone smooth performance and fingerprint scanner)

Haven't got the phone, but from research i'm doing, it seem like a big annoying issue.

Hi, I have the 2GB version, but I also have a similar phone with stock Android, so I'm going to compare these two.
Multitasking in MIUI is very tight, don't expect to keep switching to more than 2 apps instantly, there will be lags and loading animation. Yes killing in background is frequent, there is a page on Security app called Autostart that is listing apps that are actually running, and I have never seen more than 4-5 apps tagged as running, assuming you keep autostart off. However, if you tag an app as autostart enabled, even if they're killed they will start again in background, so you won't have problems with notification, at the expense of a little battery life. This is kinda complicated but offers for more control. Notice that app that isn't tagged as running and not autostart enabled is dead dead, no notification, no background process, no battery drain.
I don't think there'll be much different for Pro version in multitasking, I have seen the same thing on Mi 5, it's just the way MIUI works. But yes the $30 is definitely worth it for double the storage, 150% RAM, and fingerprint.
Note that you can disable the background killing in developer options, disable MIUI battery optimization, and tag all apps as autostart enabled, to get better multitasking experience as good as stock Android, but apparently this is not a good idea if the phone is only having 2GB of RAM, the lag is becoming too much in my opinion, because MIUI does keeping around 1GB for itself in this phone. Hope that helps.

I'll keep this short and sweet. Am on latest xiaomi.eu's 6.5.26 dev build for my ido and dare I say it's the best representation of how it should be done for MIUI global rels. Most crufts removed and loose ends tightened. That being said and not that I blame xiaomi.eu's team in any shape or form, they have to work with what they got so suffice to say that MIUI by default could seriously use way better RAM management chops.
If it's just $30 more for Pro and you don't care about a larger screen estate (kenzo), then go for it bro double time.

Related

So is honor 5X running CM13 or any other "lightweight" ROM significantly faster?

So is honor 5X running CM13 or any other "lightweight" ROM significantly faster?
I used Nexus 5 for 2,5 years. What a great phone it was.
My usage consists of:
a) endomondo,
b) relay for reddit,
c) browsing teh internet,
No gaming whatsoever.
My N5's power button died (RIP) so I decided to give Honor 5X a shot, since I had opportunity to get it really cheap.
I love the feeling of the phone, the screen and battery life and fingerprint sensor are amazing - even the camera which is mediocre at best by today's standards surpasses the one on my good old N5.
BUT it is so much slower than N5 that it starts to really grind my gears.
When an app is opened, it works just fine - however the speed of changing apps is terrible, EMUI is way too aggressive with RAM management aswell. Waiting 5s for hangouts to load gets annoying really fast.
I currently use Nova Prime with stock OS and other than the speed itself I have no complaints, I really like the phone.
So, my question is: did you notice significant speed increase after flashing CM/alike ROM? Is it worth the hassle for someone who did not do it before?
Thanks in advance.
Yes, I believe that is a noticeable performance increase and is well worth trying out - just make sure you make a full Nandroid backup in case anything goes wrong and then you're safe to do as you please. I don't think it's too much hassle. It's pretty fast for this kind of hardware at this price point, But of course, this isn't a flagship phone like a Nexus so don't expect speeds of that caliber. Overall CM 13 feels buttery smooth to me. I have no issues with it whatsoever. Some people may have issues with XPosed, but so far I have none- your mileage may vary.
The only thing you might miss is the current lack of Fingerprint support - the Devs are aware of this and are working hard at this and are always being harassed about it, haha. Real work on that sensor won't be until the Official Marshmallow release, and it's not even a guarantee since the devs work on this ROM in their spare time. I still give props to crpalmer for providing us with such a nice CM13 for the Honor 5X.
Yes. Former Nexus 5 user as well and I loved that phone to death. CM13 performance on the Honor 5X is comparable to Marshmallow on N5. Very occasional minor hitches and glitches, and the rare crash and reboot, but overall buttery smooth just like the N5 and I am very happy with it. Leaps and bounds better than EMUI.
Biggest improvement is multitasking in my opinion. The EMUI Task switcher is glitchy and clunky and as soon as you start flying back and forth between apps on the recent screen in CM13 it will hit you how slow and limiting EMUI has been.
yes, I am running parallel shifts on SlimROM by @jsbeyond and the default EMUI (rooted and debloated), and the difference is quite telling! It almost seems like a competent athlete speeding away to the racing line while running Slim, while on EMUI it runs like an injured confused directionless bum. Only thing I miss from EMUI is the camera app
Like @mtmv2 said, multi tasking and fluidity is where you will feel most of the difference. I personally felt that the audio output (speakers) on Slim is also way less muffled than in EMUI. I use V4A as well, on both, so I am sure of the difference in audio with the same V4A profiles running in both environments. Battery on Slim is more controllable for drain, privacy protection, boot apps control etc is way better. Best of all is the battery saver, that stops the auto-sync only and helps battery last longer unlike in the EMUI which turns the phone into a 1990s sort of device with call and paging functions the moment you pick "battery saving mode"! Least said the better, but Slim restores all the android dignity of icons and animations compared to the toyish, immature, wannabe UI of the OEM.

Multitasking/RAM

You're busy and don't have time to wait, which is why you need to stop reading this thread and get back to organizing your Pogs. Rate this thread to express how the Xiaomi Mi A1 performs when multitasking. A higher rating indicates that the Xiaomi Mi A1 keeps many apps in memory so that they don't need to reload, and that when moving between apps, transitions are smooth and performance is excellent.
Then, drop a comment if you have anything to add!
When I run Google play store in background, other apps in foreground starts not responding.
3.5 gigs of RAM are excellent (~0.5 gigs are left for the GPU). What I don't understand is that why this device employs a 512MB swap partition which causes wear and tear of its internal storage. I'm sure as hell this swap partition cannot be disabled without rooting which I'd love to avoid.
Actually it is very smooth in terms of multi-tasking
is it just me or anyone else experienced the same thing? my recent apps keep restarting even when i got about just 4 or 5 apps opened. i checked the ram usage but it seems normal, it uses about 60-70% of ram. does anyone know whats going on here?
What i have observed is, android OS and system, and few other Google apps take up 1.5+ Gigs of RAM. I am not quite satisfied with that...
However the performance and multitasking is very good though.
Eshwar123 said:
What i have observed is, android OS and system, and few other Google apps take up 1.5+ Gigs of RAM. I am not quite satisfied with that...
However the performance and multitasking is very good though.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That means that 2,5 gb of ram is unused and wasted.
Sent from my Mi A1 using Tapatalk
Can any one help in my problem.. when I leave a app for multitasking that app get automatically closed and not even shows in recent apps what is wrong with i m unable to understand this..
Sk.asifkhan said:
Can any one help in my problem.. when I leave a app for multitasking that app get automatically closed and not even shows in recent apps what is wrong with i m unable to understand this..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Restart your phone. Happens to me a lot on stock.
ability to use split screen for 2 apps is really nice.
Pretty much mid-range performance, as per expectation
My MiA1 since September 2017, Stock/OTA Android 8.1.0, November 2018, no further updates (Rejected all Android 9/P updates so far, latest November 2019).
Not Rooted.
Usage (Average) Statistics:
RAM: 4 GB, ~39% Free.
Int Storage: 64 GB, 55% Available.
Ext Storage: 32 GB, 13% Available.
Total number of Apps installed: 293 (true!)
Self-installed Apps: 275 (!!!)
System Apps: 18
Maintenance Apps: Greenify, AccuBattery, AntiVirus, Button Mapper, Android Assistance, ...
No crunchy Video Games, Flight Simulators etc.
Performance: Average without lags, Multitasking, split screen or with flipscreen.
Crashed twice in two years.
Currently Android is up for last 21 days no drags.
(I, usually, Shutdown in 10 days, as cleanup)
Phone goes in deep sleep (>80% of time) when inactive and screen off.
LiPo battery BN31 with ~2800mAh (90% of original) after 2+1/4 yrs
I charge 10-80% at 1.95A or 0.67C
30-40hrs use between charging.
Screen on Time 4-5hrs (~12% of use).
My Multitasking rating 3.5 / 5.
Pretty disappointing
Memory management is horrible in this phone..I have to restart the phone every 2 days.. otherwise the OS will keep killing background apps..even if u left any application to check a message or something, Android will instantly kill that app and you'll have to wait for it to reload again.. anything u were doing in that app is just gone ..I rooted my phone using magisk and uninstalled many bloatware like ant Hal services etc,..I use SD maid pro to clear caches, force closed every other app,tried to tweak the settings of the low memory killer, increased the size of the swap file even overclocked the phone to stay running at the max CPU ratio but nothing worked ..apps keeps getting closed the exact second u leave them despite having more than 2 gigs of free RAM
A1 just works fine for me

RAM

Is it just me, or does the phone use a lot of RAM? Mine seems to be using 2.7GB minimum at all times. Seems high.
Higher would be more ideal. The Windows mindset of "I'm running out of RAM!" doesn't get you anywhere here; in Android, empty RAM is wasted RAM. My Droid Turbo averages ~1.8gb used of 3gb. Seems Nougat tries to average 60%-70% usage.
When you switch out of an app, it's moved to the background and (usually) suspended, but kept in memory so you can switch back to it quickly. It's things like this that take up memory you think should be "free".
In the event that you need to load up a big app, stuff running in the background is quickly and gracefully unloaded.
Unless you're getting constant foreground app crashes - which might indicate that something is forcefully keeping itself loaded and starving everything else of needed memory - you shouldn't worry about it. Android is fairly good at handling memory these days.
Septfox said:
Higher would be more ideal. The Windows mindset of "I'm running out of RAM!" doesn't get you anywhere here; in Android, empty RAM is wasted RAM. My Droid Turbo averages ~1.8gb used of 3gb. Seems Nougat tries to average 60%-70% usage.
When you switch out of an app, it's moved to the background and (usually) suspended, but kept in memory so you can switch back to it quickly. It's things like this that take up memory you think should be "free".
In the event that you need to load up a big app, stuff running in the background is quickly and gracefully unloaded.
Unless you're getting constant foreground app crashes - which might indicate that something is forcefully keeping itself loaded and starving everything else of needed memory - you shouldn't worry about it. Android is fairly good at handling memory these days.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I notice this issue more on custom ROMs than stock firmware. On mine and my wife's Quarks (3GB RAM, as you well know), running Marshmallow and Lollipop versions of the same ROM, something causes the phones to just freeze up for about a minute, crashes, then RAM is released to use. It was happening at least once a day on my phone, then my wife said it was happening to her phone. (Our old phones, not the new LG V30 phones.) I've messed with the LMK settings, trying different combinations, to no avail. And I did report it in the Nougat ROM thread for that phone. (Marshmallow ROM thread no longer has support.)
So, while I totally agree with your answer, it is the technically correct answer, I do understand the OP's concern. I've gotten to the point where I like to see more free RAM, so I know my phone isn't about to freeze up. At least on my old phone.
I love custom ROMs, but the past couple of weeks it's been nice to run stock on my new LG V30 and have a very fluid experience. I've not disabled anything. I saw some others disable stuff and then got lagging. I've not touched a thing and my phone is very smooth.
Could a "theme" downloaded from play store take up a lot of RAM and/or slow things down, too?
This is my first experience with a theme.
coldbeverage said:
Could a "theme" downloaded from play store take up a lot of RAM and/or slow things down, too?
This is my first experience with a theme.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Possibly, but probably not. From what I've seen, LG themes seem to skin far less than say, substratum does, and even substratum is pretty lightweight unless you get into transparent themes.
Keep in mind the default theme is itself...well, a theme. You're not really saving anything by staying on it. If you see a skin you like, use it, if you're really worried use one of the LG-provided ones that come with the phone.
ChazzMatt said:
I notice this issue more on custom ROMs than stock firmware. On mine and my wife's Quarks (3GB RAM, as you well know), running Marshmallow and Lollipop versions of the same ROM, something causes the phones to just freeze up for about a minute, crashes, then RAM is released to use. It was happening at least once a day on my phone, then my wife said it was happening to her phone. (Our old phones, not the new LG V30 phones.) I've messed with the LMK settings, trying different combinations, to no avail. And I did report it in the Nougat ROM thread for that phone. (Marshmallow ROM thread no longer has support.)
So, while I totally agree with your answer, it is the technically correct answer, I do understand the OP's concern. I've gotten to the point where I like to see more free RAM, so I know my phone isn't about to freeze up. At least on my old phone.
I love custom ROMs, but the past couple of weeks it's been nice to run stock on my new LG V30 and have a very fluid experience. I've not disabled anything. I saw some others disable stuff and then got lagging. I've not touched a thing and my phone is very smooth.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Interesting. It does seem like stock ROMs tend to be more conservative with RAM usage, whereas custom ROMs will have less aggressive minfree settings in order to keep more stuff loaded up. "Unused RAM is wasted RAM", but only up to a certain point; in my experience (Maserati with its ancient kernel as well as Quark) approaching ~100mb of free memory in LP/MM/N can bring things to a crawl, and pushing it can cause a kernel panic :good:
The only issue I've seen in Quark RR has been with the Pixiv app, though, and it does exactly what you said. But...I'm fairly certain the app itself leaks memory, as it only happens after browsing a while and is perfectly fine for another stretch after it OOMs and restarts.
My experience with stock ROMs in the past - Quark included - has been "smooth but lacking in features/customization" --- I've never really understood the complaints that stock is slow and claims that custom is blazing fast in comparison. The OEM has a decided advantage in that they have all the tools they need to compile the ROM properly, with then-current driver and kernel sources and a deep understanding of the hardware...I'd be really surprised to find a stock ROM from the last few years to be slower than custom.
But to be honest, my sample size is pretty small. *shrugs* I stick by what I've said, though, if anything the V30 doesn't use its memory enough; some people have complained about apps popping out of memory sooner than expected. LG is still putting out updates too, if a memory-management problem is found, hopefully they'll get right on fixing it.

100% CPU load... but why?

I have an LG V20 running Android 7.1.1 that frequently is at 100% CPU load. For no apparent reason. I'm running a GPS Logger, Google Maps Navigation and a podcast player, and it makes the phone go nuts. It's very slow, sometimes I can't even turn on the screen, use my fingerprint or anything else. For a few minutes. I mean come on, it's a Snapdragon 820 with 4 gigs of RAM. Surely that must be enough? And in the beginning, it was. I've also had a Xiaomi Mi 6 for a while, and it had absolutely no issues at all. Granted the 835 is faster, but not _this_ much faster. I also have a OnePlus Two which faces the same issues, and which can't even charge the battery properly. Perhaps some malware on both phones? But I can't find the malware or poorly programmed software, because Android's malware protection is counterproductive.
So there is some app somewhere that is running amok. But which one? Since Nougat doesn't allow for task managers for security reasons (haha, funny) I can't see how the CPU load of individual apps and services is. Or can I? Where can one complain to Google? I found a bug report, but the devs just said "yup, working as intended". If they'd integrate a task manager where I can see the CPU load, fine. But it looks like they won't even do that. If I could, I would go back to Android 6.
Any suggestions what I could do? Looking at the battery use is of little help. It doesn't show anything out of the ordinary.

Question Laggy UI and bad real world performance

I recently went from a oneplus 5 to the nord 200 when I switched to t-mobile because of the free promotion. Before I got it I did a little bit of research on the processor and storage speed and didn't expect much of a difference in performance because the snapdragon 480 seems to be fairly powerful and the nord has the same UFS 2.1 storage as my old phone.
I was pretty disappointed to find in my use the phone about 1/2 the time the phone was pretty sluggish in the general user experience and app launch times were significantly longer. May be placebo, but I disabled digital wellbeing, and all the tmobile bloatware and it may have helped a little. I remember reading oneplus heavily throttled some of their phones in recent history. I may switch back to my old phone.
I know the device is relatively new, do you guys think it will get better with software updates or is this just how it is?
I found turning on "Mobile data always active" in the developer options massively improved performance in my apps (at least where online load times and download speeds in-game were concerned)
Did you just get your phone recently? After setting up this phone for the first time, I also noticed the device was extremely slow, with all the app and software updates happening in the background. After all the updates were installed, I turned the phone off for about a day, and performance went to normal. It's not as fast as a flagship and there are minor hiccups here and there, but that's about what I expected from a 400 series SoC.
My original report was the day after I set everything up, I disabled the permissions for the launcher which did improve the responsiveness of the launcher, but application performance and launch times are still slow compared to my old device and not what I would expect from a phone of this spec.
I'm pretty confident this phone is a victim of oneplus' recently reported throttling for battery life. I was curious and compared geekbench scores (which aren't throttled under oneplus' list) and both the nord and my oneplus 5 got fairly similar scores for both cpu and compute. I tried out a browser benchmark motionmark which benches graphics performance. The nord got a 25 and the oneplus 5 got a 189... I ran the test again to make sure but got similar results.
That graphics should be coming from gpu and not cpu though....
I tested cpu and compute on geekbench, compute is a measure of gpu performance. The nord scored a little higher than the 5 in that.
I would assume oneplus' throttling would effect cpu and gpu but even if not, my oneplus 5 scoring almost 8x as high does not seem anywhere near normal
T1Coreon said:
I recently went from a oneplus 5 to the nord 200 when I switched to t-mobile because of the free promotion. Before I got it I did a little bit of research on the processor and storage speed and didn't expect much of a difference in performance because the snapdragon 480 seems to be fairly powerful and the nord has the same UFS 2.1 storage as my old phone.
I was pretty disappointed to find in my use the phone about 1/2 the time the phone was pretty sluggish in the general user experience and app launch times were significantly longer. May be placebo, but I disabled digital wellbeing, and all the tmobile bloatware and it may have helped a little. I remember reading oneplus heavily throttled some of their phones in recent history. I may switch back to my old phone.
I know the device is relatively new, do you guys think it will get better with software updates or is this just how it is?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Same experience here, i picked up this phone expecting at least a decent experience but still get bad slow not usable for everyday tasks sometimes.
Im not expecting a flagship performance of course but this is far from decent in my experience.
I hope android 12 will solve many performance issues. Or custom fw
I'm about to throw away this phone into trash. Did not expect so weak dev community activity. The laggy interface is almost unusable if you constantly swap between apps and find them unloaded from RAM. All my text or uploaded content just disappear. It is very frustrating experience. I never had this behaviour with my 2/32 gb xiaomi.
zaooza said:
I'm about to throw away this phone into trash. The laggy interface is almost unusable if you constantly swap between apps and find them unloaded from RAM. All my text or uploaded content just disappear. It is very frustrating experience. I never had this behaviour with my 2/32 gb xiaomi.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you're really at your wit's end, have you considered installing a GSI? I've tried Phh's AOSP w/ gapps, and once you register your device with Google, it works flawlessly (except safetynet/drm) and is a million times faster than stock. Or I'd be more than happy to take your device off your hands.
zaooza said:
Did not expect so weak dev community activity.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You know, custom ROMs don't just appear out of thin air. Someone has to take the time to bring up a device and make it stable, and it's not an easy task. I would say to be patient and just accept the fact that there's no guarantee that this device will get custom ROMs.
lzgmc said:
If you're really at your wit's end, have you considered installing a GSI? I've tried Phh's AOSP w/ gapps, and once you register your device with Google, it works flawlessly (except safetynet/drm) and is a million times faster than stock. Or I'd be more than happy to take your device off your hands.
You know, custom ROMs don't just appear out of thin air. Someone has to take the time to bring up a device and make it stable, and it's not an easy task. I would say to be patient and just accept the fact that there's no guarantee that this device will get custom ROMs.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Any disadvantages with gsi besides safety net drm? Want to try gsi but this is new to me
Metconnect2000 said:
Any disadvantages with gsi besides safety net drm? Want to try gsi but this is new to me
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Other than pictures from the camera being degraded compared to stock and having to install apps from the Play Store/changing a few settings in the Settings app, everything seems to work fine

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