Hero becomes sluggish after a while

[Guest T39andcounting]

I've got an Orange Hero using the Modaco 3.0 ROM. Just after a reboot it runs nicely, with everything loading quickly (couple of exceptions below), but after a while it slows down. I use Advanced Task Killer Free to kill apps that are running, which seems to make a difference, but I thought that Android was supposed to kill apps itself to prevent it getting laggy?

Things that never seem very fast are swivelling to horizontal, opening the keyboard, or opening the Mesages app.

Anyone else get this? Any suggestions on how to make it run faster? Would a hard reset help (I don't particularly want to do this and then have to load all my settings back!).

[Guest venturerider]

Have you tried it without the task killer?

[Guest Higgsy]

have you installed teks latest kernel v1.9.1, this release was brought out just for this reason - I found that my hero would become sluggish but since the update its much better - tek uses a 128mb pool of compressed ram in that one.

[Guest venturerider]

Strange, but for me 1.91 had the opposite effect.

[Guest Higgsy]

Strange, but for me 1.91 had the opposite effect.

What it made it slower? Weird mine def maintains speed after a few days up time

[Guest venturerider]

What it made it slower? Weird mine def maintains speed after a few days up time

Without ramzswap, Android maintains my available RAM above 20MB pretty much all the time. I have SysTray Monitor running and can see when Android starts to free up memory. It's actually quite good how Android manages the memory. With ramzswap, my available RAM would go down below 20MB (around 16MB, even) and not come up. This is just my observations. Not sure if this was causing the slowdowns.

[Guest T39andcounting]

have you installed teks latest kernel v1.9.1, this release was brought out just for this reason - I found that my hero would become sluggish but since the update its much better - tek uses a 128mb pool of compressed ram in that one.

thanks, I've given the new kernel a go. Didn't notice there was a newer version. Keyboard opening definitely seems quicker, but I'll have to give it a few days to see if it makes a long term difference.

As a side note, great thing about Android is that I can update the kernel while sitting in the car waiting for my OH to finish the shopping!

[Guest HuntNet]

In my experience, disabling ramzswap makes the device much faster, and keeps it from getting sluggy. Don't really see the point in ramzswap anyway. Try disabling ramzswap and see if it runs better.

[Guest Dan Mullen]

In my experience, disabling ramzswap makes the device much faster, and keeps it from getting sluggy. Don't really see the point in ramzswap anyway. Try disabling ramzswap and see if it runs better.

My phone is definitely more sluggish recently... takes a few seconds to "wake up", then button presses and screen swipes aren't registering as quickly as they should. How do you disable ramzswap? I'd like to compare before and after.

[Guest T39andcounting]

How do you disable ramzswap? I'd like to compare before and after.

I was going to ask the same question. Don't think I've seen an app or a setting for ramzswap anywhere.

[Guest HuntNet]

There's no app or setting for this yet, you can disable it from the shell with ADB:

$ adb shell swapoff /dev/block/ramzswap0

It might take a up to a couple of minutes, depends on how much of the swap is in use at that moment, and try the phone afterwards.

[Guest dkodr]

There's no app or setting for this yet, you can disable it from the shell with ADB:

$ adb shell swapoff /dev/block/ramzswap0

It might take a up to a couple of minutes, depends on how much of the swap is in use at that moment, and try the phone afterwards.

And how do we turn ramzswap back on if disabling it doesn't help?

[Guest keyra74]

adb shell swapon /dev/block/ramzswap0

[Guest Dan Mullen]

There's no app or setting for this yet, you can disable it from the shell with ADB:

$ adb shell swapoff /dev/block/ramzswap0

It might take a up to a couple of minutes, depends on how much of the swap is in use at that moment, and try the phone afterwards.

Presumably this just disables it for the current session. What is the solution for disabling permanently please, if it turns out to perform better without it?

[Guest masterpfa]

My phone is definitely more sluggish recently... takes a few seconds to "wake up", then button presses and screen swipes aren't registering as quickly as they should. How do you disable ramzswap? I'd like to compare before and after.

I can agree with what all are saying here currently my phone does feel a tad sluggish.

I had tried AOSP 2.0 for a while, I was so impressed with the speed of the phone.

Although very much experimental and without HTC sense, I did like it speed and smoothness

But as I said very much experimental, so reverted back, via a Nandroid back up to MCR 3.0, Teck Kernel 1.91

OK giving this a try will monitor for a few days to see if any improvement.

Thanks for the info

:)

[Guest Dan Mullen]

I can agree with what all are saying here currently my phone does feel a tad sluggish.

I had tried AOSP 2.0 for a while, I was so impressed with the speed of the phone.

Although very much experimental and without HTC sense, I did like it speed and smoothness

But as I said very much experimental, so reverted back, via a Nandroid back up to MCR 3.0, Teck Kernel 1.91

OK giving this a try will monitor for a few days to see if any improvement.

Thanks for the info

:)

I tried opening the camera app earlier to take a photo of my daughter playing with her guitar ;) It literally took over a minute from touching the icon until it was ready to take a photo. I only rebooted last night to see if that would help. Swiping through the main menu is taking around 8-10 seconds for my swipe to register, and even then it's very jittery B)

[Guest IZIIZI]

same here, hero is sluggish for me. restart helps, but this shouldnt be happening...

[Guest clarkEEE1]

Are you killing tasks after using an app I always kill tasks straight away like the browser takes up alot of memory and so do other apps running in the background the less apps you have running will speed up the phone.

[Guest masterpfa]

Presumably this just disables it for the current session. What is the solution for disabling permanently please, if it turns out to perform better without it?

Can you confirm if this just disables the current session, or all sessions

[Guest Dan Mullen]

Are you killing tasks after using an app I always kill tasks straight away like the browser takes up alot of memory and so do other apps running in the background the less apps you have running will speed up the phone.

I don't usually as you shouldn't need to. I never used any sort of task killer on previous versions of MCR (2.5.1 and earlier), and never experienced any sort of slow-down. With the problems I'm been having recently I've installed Advanced Task Killer Free and tried it out. It usually reports around 18MB RAM free. When I kill a few tasks like browser and music, it does free up RAM and that seems to speed up my phone a bit.

I'm just wondering if the ramzswap thing interferes with the standard Android memory management, i.e. stops Android from killing tasks that, without the cache, it would usually kill.

[Guest starfarer]

Even with Orange ROM, I thought Hero was pretty fast. Updated to MCR3.0, updated to latest released teknologist kernel 1.91( was curious :) ) and still no lag and honestly didn't felt any faster or better.

At first i used to kill apps using taskkillers. It kind of gets you in habbit of killing everything that's displayed there. But recently I've stopped "killing" apps and only peek just to look at available RAM/ROM(??). So far lowest available memory I've seen is 19MB. Now if I open couple more apps at this point, available memory goes up( i think android memory management kicks in). If I'm to "properly" close like co-pilot/Dolphin browser with it's exit function, memory jumps which comes down after a while (again i think system management distributing/allocating available memory to running background services/apps possibly in priority order). All this on latest released 1.91 kernel with ramzswap enabled.

And to add bit more, I've apps2sd on 8GB class 2 card. The most it takes for few apps sometimes is 5s to open like Astro file manager, albums, mail, handcent sms and taskkiller itself. The worst is 10s to open QuickUninstall if I close on first place. Well if this the "lag/slow downs" everyones talking about, then I've to look for Class6 microSD ;)