To cache or not to cache? - Droid Eris Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

Ok so my question is... Should the cache file setup for a2sd be 0 or not? Some set it to 0 stating that the internal cache is faster and with apps on sd there is plenty of internal cache. Some set cache file when partitioning external. Should we not be setting a cache file up at all when partitioning for a2sd?
Thanks for any input. BTW I have 256mb cache, 1Gb ext3, on a 16Gb class 6 card.

I think you mean swap, not cache.
BTW, freeing up space in the system flash ( "/data" ) partition will not improve your phones' performance - unless you take other specific actions, that empty file space just sits there unused - it is not reclaimed to be "put to better uses". Not that it matters, anyway: it's flash memory, after all - not RAM (it's dog slow).
Your results using swap will vary. Some have reported that (most notably in the case of the browser or the "Home" provider), that using plenty of swap will prevent that app from being harvested, and so you don't have to wait for data operations to repeat (e.g. browser page reloading) when bringing the app back into the foreground.
OTOH, a good argument can also be made that adding swap merely defeats Android's built-in method for managing application harvesting, thereby making the device actually slower for a variety of operations - the automatic application harvesting kicks in "too late", and the phone gets slow for routine operations.
Having said all that, I'll tell you that I set mine to 0 (no swap at all); swap generally only helps improve your situation after you've already started to get into trouble; better to just stay out of trouble in the first place.
Good luck
bftb0

LOL... I feel like an idiot. Yep swap would be the intended question. Thank you for the very educated response, it truly helped.
Sent from my rooted playtoy

Related

[Q] SGS2 16GB internal space?

hi there i just got my sgs2 but when i looked at the internal memory it says ive only got 11.50GB space on my internal sd not 16GB has anyone got this or is my phone faulty ?
Thanks for the help =]
It is like that. Some useful taken for the system, apps, etc.
$1 gets you a reply
You never get the full 16gb from the start and then around 2gb is used for system apps u wish to install which leaves u with just over 11gb for storage.
Every1 is the same.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA App
vimto25 said:
You never get the full 16gb from the start and then around 2gb is used for system apps u wish to install which leaves u with just over 11gb for storage.
Every1 is the same.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
oh oright cheers mate
HI all
How can i see the over space ? I d't want too use it, just too verify that the total space is arround 16GB.
Thanks.
Take the system partition, add the sd card partition (not the external one, thats the sd card you put in, the sgs2 just calls extra internal storage the sd card)
Then take off a bit for the space taken up by file system formatting, hidden system bits, cache etc.
And you should have 16GB
go into settings > storage
The numbers you want are "USB storage" and "Device memory" device memory wont show total, but if you go to settings > applications > manage applications, and look at the bar at the bottom it will show the device memory used and free.
Or get a app from the market.
veyka said:
Take the system partition, add the sd card partition (not the external one, thats the sd card you put in, the sgs2 just calls extra internal storage the sd card)
Then take off a bit for the space taken up by file system formatting, hidden system bits, cache etc.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It is not as easy as it sounds with adding partitions as there are 12 partitions on a Galaxy SII, most of them not visible to the user.
If you have a file manager on the phone which can display files in /sys, then display /sys/block/mmcblk0/size (as a text file). This should display a number in 512 byte units. When you multiply this number by 512 you should get the total capacity (not including the space used by the primary bootloader maybe) On my phone I get 15,756,951,552 bytes, which is roughly 16 GB (not 16 GiB)
Well yes, but I don't think the average person will want to count down to the byte
Nice detective work though!
There is some smaller partitions (1 - 6) summing up to 46.5 MB
Then there is
- cache 100MB
- modem/radio 16MB
- system os partition 512MB
- user data partition (where, among other things, installed apps and their data are stored) 2GB
- some weird "hidden" partition I have no idea what's stored on it 512MB
That roughly summs up to 3.3G.
Addup the ~11.5GB you see as /sdcard and multiply a few times by 1024 and you get something close to 16000000000 Bytes -> there is your 16GB.
For marketing and advertisement reasons capacities are always given as "millions of bytes" with a factor of 1000, not like computers deal with it with a factor of 1024.
For that already a 16GB device shows only up as around 14.5GB on a computer.
That's also why your "1TB USB HDD" from the electronics market only shows up with something around 900GB.
Wanna see it for yourself, open up a terminal or adbshell on your SGS2 and type:
cat /proc/partitions
There you go
HellcatDroid said:
- some weird "hidden" partition I have no idea what's stored on it 512MB
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This partition has a (hidden) .ngmoco directory. As far as I remember I have seen this directory on a non-hidden partition too so this might be used to preinstall additional packages when the Android device is booted the first time.
Only about 20M of this is used on my device so thats somewhat a waste of space
HellcatDroid said:
For marketing and advertisement reasons capacities are always given as "millions of bytes" with a factor of 1000, not like computers deal with it with a factor of 1024.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes and no. It is not for marketing purposes only although they are happy to announce higher numbers. The official standard for units (gramm, meter, etc.) state that kilo is for 1000 units , mega for 1000000 units etc. The "standard" used for bytes / RAM conflicts with the standard of the SI units and is discouraged to use.
There is a "standard" which explicitly states that a factor of 1024 is used, but almost nobody uses this "standard" because it looks weird and unusual. Acoording to this standard, 1024*1024*1024 bytes are called 1 gibibyte (1 GiB). Most people (including me when I don't explicitly think about it) and appications still call this 1 gigabyte (1 GB) which leads to confusion.
Think all for these precisions. I'l take time to analyses and follow your answers.
Raz
PS : Sorry for my poor English
Some more exercise for the analytic minds here, why do Galaxy S with same 16GB Internal SD has 13.5GB after taking 2GB (RFS or EXT4, etc.) for data partition and possibly around 500MB for system?
I understand that instead of 1.8xGB as used in SGS1 is lesser than 2.1xGB in SGS2 for data partition which should include dbdata, cache, etc like in SGS1. Also accounting for those hidden partitions, we still don't know an additional 1GB lost (swap partition?)?
I would appreciate inputs from someone who knows how SGS2 utilizes internal SD and if we could repartition to reclaim some space.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=15727875&postcount=9
exactely 16G, nothing lost or unencounted for.

[Q] what is the difference between installing app on internal or external memory ?

After googling and searching alot, i didnt find my answer
so hope someone can help me here, and this will help others too.
so install apps on SD Card or Internal memory ?
The internal phone memory is generally of a lesser amount than the amount of the memory you'd have on a SD card. You cannot really change the amount of internal memory you have on your phone but you can always get a new SD card with a larger storage capacity.
So when you have apps that need a lot of space it is better to have them installed on the SD card.
will installing more apps on internal memory make the phone run slower ???
I don't think it will make the phone run slower, but you'll have lesser storage space for your other data which is stored in the internal storage like your contacts etc.
i have an HTC Sensation XE running on Darkforest ROM, this is my RAM (pic) how can i increase the free memory, thats the max i get around 180MB free
View attachment 1034360
Can I know why you wish to free up the RAM? In most cases you really don't need to because the OS manages that quite efficiently. It will free up the RAM and make room for the running applications whenever it needs to.
cuz in some apps after opening them for a while and try to close this app the phone restarts, so i read that its cuz of low RAM
please correct me if am mistaken
180 mb is a lot of RAM for a single application to use. And as I said, the OS, is pretty good at managing it. Although I cannot exactly tell you why your phone might be restarting when you close some apps, I don't really think it would be cause of the low RAM.
I checked my phone and it had about the same amount of RAM occupied as yours(i.e. 2 thirds of the total capacity). Then i started a game called Fruit Ninja which uses 3d graphics, which should need a lot of RAM. Then i pressed home and checked the RAM usage again. Even then the RAM usage did not go up by much.
You should try to verify this on your phone too. Check the amount of RAM thats being used. Then start the application thats causing the problem. Press the home button and check the RAM usage again.
An app will probably run quicker from internal mem because flash storage is much slower, but youre'e limited by space constraints.
Sent from my MB526 using XDA
Well it might load into the RAM quicker. But I don't really think there is much of a difference in speed while its running. Unless there are a lot of loading and writing operations.
Pay attention to one thing: internal storage and ram are not the same thing.
Ram is commonly allocated on a high speed journaled partition and it is 1000 times or more faster than both the internal emmc or the external SD (that'd why a swap partition is not as fast as real ram).
Just for the I/O parallelism, an app installed on the external sd could very likely run faster than one that resides in the internal emmc. Anyway, it also depends on the class of the external sd, though the class counts only when writing sequential data, while reading could even be faster when using a lower class SD.
lucaoldb said:
Pay attention to one thing: internal storage and ram are not the same thing.
Ram is commonly allocated on a high speed journaled partition and it is 1000 times or more faster than both the internal emmc or the external SD (that'd why a swap partition is not as fast as real ram).
Just for the I/O parallelism, an app installed on the external sd could very likely run faster than one that resides in the internal emmc. Anyway, it also depends on the class of the external sd, though the class counts only when writing sequential data, while reading could even be faster when using a lower class SD.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Doesn't an application get loaded into the RAM first when its started? So would its execution speed still depend on the sd/internal memory?
I thought that would come into the picture only when theres some kind of read/write thats happening to the sd/internal memory...
Well, if it is true that any app run inside the dalvik vm and such vm is able to run simultaneously multiple apps in its sandbox, I suppose that any app could need to access its installation files and its stored data while running.... I am not sure, anyway, it is just what I believe it could be.
To be true, my supposition mostly derives from what I've experienced with chrooted linux, which run faster when the .img file is stored on the external sd.
Anyway, if it should be as you say, the app's speed would be totally independent from the support where it was installed.
lucaoldb said:
Well, if it is true that any app run inside the dalvik vm and such vm is able to run simultaneously multiple apps in its sandbox, I suppose that any app could need to access its installation files and its stored data while running.... I am not sure, anyway, it is just what I believe it could be.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That is what I exactly meant. Although it differs from case to case, an application typically loads all the stored data it needs at the start. And then throughout the execution of this application, loading/saving of data is generally rare.
Of course this is a very generalized statement and such things are handled differently by different applications depending on how they were implemented and what they are intended to do.
Consider for example a game. The game would load all the textures, images, music it would need for a particular level. Then throughout the entire period of the level the game wouldn't need to load any data. It is only when some different support data would be needed by the game, or if the player's state is to be saved there would be a read/write operation. At such a time only would there be a need to access the sd/internal memory. So it really doesn't make the difference of where the game is installed very noticable.
Now on the other hand if you have an application say an Image viewer application which loads an image from the the sd/internal memory every time the "next" button is pressed. Then, maybe you'd have a noticable difference based on where the image is being loaded from. But even typical image viewers implement some sort of image caching to reduce such excessive loading.
Widgets
I had a problem where apps that used a widget option did, not give that feature anymore when the app is moved to the SD card...

AKURO-DATA2SD - mount SD as /data via init.d

this post is to introduce below tags.
research AKURO-DATA2SD (mark, right click, run "contextual search" (enable that in forum user options) in :
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1766856
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1622052
kuro's files : http://d-h.st/users/kurotsugi
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=30776034&postcount=748
akuro works in that it gives you full init.d support, but I noticed a slowdown in graphics display.
actually...it slow down our whole system a lil bit. compared to our actual /data partition, our sdcard have lower speed thus result in slower performance. the difference isn't big enough and most of us never realize it especially if we're using a fast sdcard. however, the result is quite "seeable" on benchmarking apps. the other drawback from this mod is that the ext partition on our sdcard never got unmounted when we turned off our device. if we're using low quality sdcard in several month the ext partition might get corrupted and we need reformat the partition. in my observation, with such low sdcard quality this problem comes after using this mod more than 6 months. if you get a lot of FC after using this mod for a long time then you might want to back up your files and reformat the ext partition. so far this issue is only a minor issue and rarely happened. in fact, I only got one report confirming this issue from the user. the best solution so far is trying to minimalize turning off our device or unmount it before turning it off.

Stock Gingerbread (2.3.6) LOST.DR, Tombstones, Dropbox and Optimisation Questions

So, I have a Huawei H866c and it is rooted. I am using the stock Android 2.3.6 OS.
I have SD Maid and the whole reason I am going through this now is I want to keep my phone running at its best.
I deleted many of the bloatware stock apps (the Google Play Music, Video, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Gmail, etc).
What I still have stock would be easier as I can't remember all I deleted: Browser, downloads, Maps, Navigation, Contacts, Dialer, Call log Clock Camera, Gallery, File manager, Messaging, E-mail, Phone Calendar, All Backup, Notepad, Play Store, YouTube, Google Search**
Now I had a question about that, is this Google Search app all right to delete?
Anyway back to it, I have SD Maid pro and System Tuner, so to help make things easy with all stuff in one place
Phone:
ARMv7 Processor rev 1 (v71)
Linux version 2.6.38.6-perf
800MHz
SD Card:
PQI
4GB Micro SD
A1 SD Bench results:
• SD card:
3,774MB total, 3,260 MB free
Read 16.03 MB/s - Write 2.56MB/s
• Internal Memory:
165MB total - 54MB free
Read 0.00MB/s - Write 4.93MB/s
• RAM
173MB total - 27MB free
RAM copy 807.89MB/s
Now after I totally clear out everything with system cleaner using SD Maid Pro and reboot my phone...
Before I do anything, if I open and scan with SD Maid Pro, I get 10 files every time in Tombstones and 11 in Dropbox and often get 10+ in LOST.DIR directories.
System Tuner Pro tweaks:
• Build Tweaks:
dalvik.vm.heapgrowthlimit 64m
dalvik.vm.heapsize 256m
dalvik.vmheapstartsize 8m
persist.adb.notify 0
• SysCtl Tweaks:
None because this stuff I don't understand.
• CPU Tweaks:
Performance governor
CPU Frequency 800MHz
CPU Load varies as needed
• SD Tweaks:
Cache Size 1024MB
IO Scheduler cfq
• OOM Tweaks
Preset: Medium (Foreground Apps at 4MB and Empty Apps at 64MB, gradually increasing from Foreground to Empty)
FM Radio frozen
So what I have questions with are (and I know some of these may not be possible):
• How can I change my language to British English without changing my location? I need things like market to show up in USD not Pounds? I hate switching back and forth between US and GB English.
• What are various ways I can optimise my phone for best performance? I don't care about sacrificing battery life.
• Why do I consistently get [what I assume to be] the same 10 tombstones? The drop box always increases by 11 more files over time, even if the tombstones don't (which they never do). Is this something to worry about? It takes up no room, deleting them doesn't seem to harm my phone, and it is just irritating to have to clean them up all the time. Could they be in relation to the bloatware I deleted?
Other Useful Information
I do have some random coding experience (SecondLife [yeah I know, *shudders*], C#, Java).
I also have the Android SDK Eclipse Juno and some very minor experience coding in there (trying to make a music theory quick reference app).
anathematized_one said:
• What are various ways I can optimise my phone for best performance? I don't care about sacrificing battery life.
• Why do I consistently get [what I assume to be] the same 10 tombstones? The drop box always increases by 11 more files over time, even if the tombstones don't (which they never do). Is this something to worry about? It takes up no room, deleting them doesn't seem to harm my phone, and it is just irritating to have to clean them up all the time. Could they be in relation to the bloatware I deleted?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can look at kernels that allow overclocking.
The tombstones are more comprehensive crash reports that get created when certain apps/system elements crash.
Two options:
You could either open them and see if you can figure out what is crashing from their content and then try to prevent the crashs creating those tombstones
Or you delete them all and change permissions on that folder so they can't be created anymore (works on some device and doesn't work on others), but it's a kind of crude solution.
The files in the dropbox folder are various logreports similiar to logcat but gathered from more sources, you have the same two options here.
There might be a third option where these two features can be turned off through a custom kernel / flags, but i'm not sure about that.
Removing/breaking logging features is never a good solution.
Dark3n said:
You can look at kernels that allow overclocking.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I will look more into that at another time.
Dark3n said:
The tombstones are more comprehensive crash reports that get created when certain apps/system elements crash.
Two options:
You could either open them and see if you can figure out what is crashing from their content and then try to prevent the crashs creating those tombstones
Or you delete them all and change permissions on that folder so they can't be created anymore (works on some device and doesn't work on others), but it's a kind of crude solution.
The files in the dropbox folder are various logreports similiar to logcat but gathered from more sources, you have the same two options here.
There might be a third option where these two features can be turned off through a custom kernel / flags, but i'm not sure about that.
Removing/breaking logging features is never a good solution.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, I looked at the log files and they were in relation to two specific programs, one of which I don't use (Adobe PDF reader). I forget the other (I only just now could get back on my computer and my phone doesn't have the power to open XDA in the browser). So these aren't a big deal, I can just clean them.
So another thing I was looking at was I have a better MicroSD card that I am going to switch out for my current one and I was looking into "partitioning" off some space for virtual RAM, but I don't know much about flash memory or even if this is possible on Android 2.3.6
For such a thing, I found this link (I would make an actual link but I don't have 10 posts yet) and it says:
One of the worst things on certain budget-friendly smartphones is not having quite enough RAM. This normally isn’t a big deal for many users who use their phone for the practical purposes of calling people, sending texts, and checking email. However for people who do a lot more with their devices such as gaming and heavy app usage, the shortage of RAM may be a bit more limiting. Running out of RAM can cause a lot of problems such as app crashes and large-scale lag.
[...] lower end devices can enable a swap file and partition thanks to a method written up by XDA Senior Member CarlDeanCatabay. This is similar to the pagefile used in windows, and while it isn’t nearly as fast as RAM, it may help certain apps that require a bit more breathing room.
[...]
What is SWAP : Swap is, in short, virtual RAM. With swap, a small portion of the hard drive is set aside and used like RAM. The computer will attempt to keep as much information as possible in RAM until the RAM is full. At that point, the computer will begin moving inactive blocks of memory (called pages) to the hard disk, freeing up RAM for active processes. [...]
What you need:
MiniTool Partition Wizard for SD Card Partitioning
A MicroSD HC 4GB or higher class 6 or class 10
MicroSD HC Card Adapter
A card reader (if your pc doesn’t have card reader built in | USB Mount is not adviseable)
Swapper2 from Google Play Store [DOWNLOAD]
ADB Shell or terminal Emulator (to check if swap is activated)
Make sure you have BusyBox installed
How to create Swap Partition
[...]
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Does that look like something that is legitimate?
Is there any other/better way to virtually increase the RAM? I just tried that above method and couldn't even get it to work. I swapped to my other 4 gig micro SD:
• Samsung microSDHC
• Read 18.81 MB/s - write 3.56 MB/s
So it can't read as fast but writes faster, then again I also have it formatted with 3 different partitions from where I was going to try out the swapping but that failed so... who knows when I quit being lazy and reformat it to be normal.

Galaxy s3 much faster when internal memory is empty

Hi!
I noticed a trend: whenever my internal memory is about half full, the phone starts lagging terribly. When I clean the memory (usually by deleting some blobs of misc files in the 0 directory), the phone is amazingly fast. Can anyone tell me why that is? Are we not supposed to use this internal space? Or is the problem in the type of files I am deleting, are they slowing the system down? I'm guessing this might be a general Android issue.
dryettini said:
Hi!
I noticed a trend: whenever my internal memory is about half full, the phone starts lagging terribly. When I clean the memory (usually by deleting some blobs of misc files in the 0 directory), the phone is amazingly fast. Can anyone tell me why that is? Are we not supposed to use this internal space? Or is the problem in the type of files I am deleting, are they slowing the system down? I'm guessing this might be a general Android issue.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
of course yes. no apps installed=faster phone. once you start installing and using apps, the ram is used.. you already know that. once the ram is used, it depends on how much free ram is left. more free ram=faster phone. if you would like to: root and install greenify. that would help a bit.
:good:
sriram231092 said:
of course yes. no apps installed=faster phone. once you start installing and using apps, the ram is used.. you already know that. once the ram is used, it depends on how much free ram is left. more free ram=faster phone. if you would like to: root and install greenify. that would help a bit.
:good:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The problem is that I am not installing/uninstalling apps. And I mean the internal ROM space, in my case, 16 Gb, not the RAM. As for greenify, the opinions on that piece of software are divided, some are comparing it to the useless task killers. And anyway, I tried it and it did nothing for me.
dryettini said:
The problem is that I am not installing/uninstalling apps. And I mean the internal ROM space, in my case, 16 Gb, not the RAM. As for greenify, the opinions on that piece of software are divided, some are comparing it to the useless task killers. And anyway, I tried it and it did nothing for me.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
all are related. the more internal space the apps occupy, the more ram is used and hence it starts lagging.
dryettini said:
The problem is that I am not installing/uninstalling apps. And I mean the internal ROM space, in my case, 16 Gb, not the RAM. As for greenify, the opinions on that piece of software are divided, some are comparing it to the useless task killers. And anyway, I tried it and it did nothing for me.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Read the greenify thread you will know it is not 'some useless task killer'
sent from the state where marijuana is NOT illegal !
sriram231092 said:
all are related. the more internal space the apps occupy, the more ram is used and hence it starts lagging.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The "Internal phone storage" refers to the portion of on-board flash space set aside for APK files, databases, preferences, and other local files.
RAM has nothing to do with internal storage.Running programs (OS and end-user apps) consume RAM, but only while they are running. And RAM gets wiped on a reboot or while using task managers.
Only apps/system processes running in background takes up RAM. More apps doesnt automatically mean more RAM wasted.
MoonBlade said:
The "Internal phone storage" refers to the portion of on-board flash space set aside for APK files, databases, preferences, and other local files.
RAM has nothing to do with internal storage.Running programs (OS and end-user apps) consume RAM, but only while they are running. And RAM gets wiped on a reboot or while using task managers.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
that is good description. also please solve his problem if you can.
:good:
After you install an App and start using them, small secondary data files are created automatically. These files are stored inside the device and act as a cache for future use for the apps. Even though these cache files are very small in size initially, they pick up size over a period of time. Cache memory is supposed to speed up app and Android device performance. But too much of cache will have opposite effect. Your device performance will slow down considerably and also you lose lot of internal memory.
But this still doesnt explain how deleting certain files on 0 folder improve the speed ! if you could explain which files you deleted that might help in finding the cause.
Does he mean the 0 folder that 4.2 installation creates?
Only way I can see clearing space on the internal sd card would help is if you have a lot of bad blocks, which the emmc chip is tripping over on each write.
I've never used the internal sd to store anything, never had a freeze or stutter either. The two might not be linked but given the awful memory design of these phones I'm trying to avoid the problem occurring.

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