Lesson learned - thousands of sms = laggy phone

[Guest le_lutin]

I've been ROM hopping for the last few weeks/months trying to get a ROM that suited me. For some reason, every rom i tried felt laggy and I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was. The function I use most on the phone is SMS (handcent) and every time I wanted to send a message opening up the app seemed to take ages and it never seemed to be in RAM. When I received a message, the phone's screen would wake up and then I would get the text about 3 seconds later

I was on a few of Paul's ROMs, then baadnewz' ROM and the problem always seemed to be the same. I would always restore my sms using mybackup each time I put on a new ROM.

Then I tried MIUI and voila!, the lag was gone - instant texting and the app seemed to stay in memory in a way it didn't on other ROMs. But then I looked into the settings and realised that the miui app had limited each conversation to 200 messages and deleted the rest. I was happy with this so I removed the limit and restored the backup. MIUI didn't like this one little bit. It basically froze every time I went into the sms app (or indeed handcent). It seemed that having thousands of sms (around 7000) made the phone very, very slow indeed.

It was only then that I realised that this had been the issue all along (doh!). Android must load all your SMSes when opening the sms app (this explains the delay when receiving).

Anyway, i'm just writing this here in case it's useful for anyone else. I really don't see why I should have to delete sms periodically (searching old texts is sometimes very useful), but that's android I guess.

Edited December 30, 2010 by le_lutin

[Guest ritdaw]

I've found that if you leave your sms threads to get large, say 1000+ they can take hours to delete - yes hours!

Edited December 30, 2010 by ritdaw

[Guest EddyOS]

This is why I delete SMSs after being read. If someone has information I actually need then I ask them to email it to me

[Guest Gandalf-LoJ]

There are several apps out there that enable downloading of SMS. I've got one, TXTract, that downloads and emails all of my SMS messages to an address of my choice, I can then delete them. I do this once I get to around 1000 SMS in total. Keeps the phone nice and snappy :(

[Guest le_lutin]

There are several apps out there that enable downloading of SMS. I've got one, TXTract, that downloads and emails all of my SMS messages to an address of my choice, I can then delete them. I do this once I get to around 1000 SMS in total. Keeps the phone nice and snappy :(

I don't know why I hadn't made the connection before between the lag and the amount of messages I had, but I do think that Android could manage this scenario far, far better.