A2SD - Why? Performance/Space?

[Guest franciswills]

Firstly, let's be clear here - I am not slagging off anyone's work, quite the contrary in fact. Big thank you to Paul, teknologist and all the other that have made my phone so much better and faster.

What is the point of Apps2SD?

The only one I can see is that if you have a *lot* of apps, you might run out of space on the phone's ROM. In this case, having more space on an SD partition obviously makes sense.

A lot of people seem to think it improves performance. I can see no reason why this would be the case since it's ROM space, not RAM, that these apps are occupying. If I'm wrong, please correct me but make sure you explain why. On a slight tangent to this, does anyone have any read/write speed benchmarks of the phone's ROM vs. Class 2/4/6/X SD cards? ie. Do apps launch faster from the SD card?

Thanks for your help.

Edited January 12, 2010 by franciswills

[Guest pillock]

The main reason on previous phones such as G1 and Magic is that there's limited space for apps, so Apps2SD just gives you heaps more room to play with.

With Hero, the reason people still use it even though the average user has more than enough room to install apps, is app portability. People on this forum generally like to play with ROMs, which usually involve a wipe when you're changing between ROMs with a different base kernel or with a sufficiently different framework. If you're running Apps2SD on both the ROMs you're swapping between, then your apps should be available immediately on the new ROM the first time you boot (although if my understanding is right, there'll be a big delay in this first boot while it processes the apks).

This is why people like chefs/devs to include Apps2SD in the ROM, so their apps are available as soon as they install the ROM.

A popular misconception on phones, including Android, is that your phone will slow down the more apps you install. Wrong! People just assume this is how any computer works - Windows, OSX, Linux, phones, media players.... just because Windows manages virtual memory poorly, and that slows to a crawl when it runs out of disk space.

Your phone should run at the same speed whether you have 1MB free, or 100MB free. The only thing that will affect this is the number of running apps which are using the CPU. As such, you shouldn't notice any speed increase at all moving non-running apps to SD card.

[Guest Ayulin]

My understanding is that the SD card is much much slower than installing and running apps from the phone's internal memory. Apps2SD is kind of a holdover from the Dream/G1, which didn't have as much memory as the Hero does, and so couldn't have as many apps installed to the phone as the Hero can without performance degrading.

Apps2SD on the Hero wouldn't improve performance, as accessing external storage (the SD card) will always be slower than internal memory (the RAM/ROM of the phone). It's a similar situation with access times from RAM on your computer as compared with from the hard drive.

EDIT: Heh, beat.

Edited January 12, 2010 by Ayulin

[Guest franciswills]

Thanks. Just confirming what I thought. App portability is a good reason.

[Guest kendon]

i have 284 apps installed in /data/app and /data/app-private, which use 279.6mb of memory in these two folders. this makes just under 1mb per app, plus the space it occupies in /data/dalvik-cache. now look at your free internal storage, divide that by 1 and you know much apps you can install without apps2sd. IMHO the number you will get is far from "a lot"...

[Guest inkspad]

Ok, another newbie question... I'm running modaco 2.2 ROM for CDMA Hero with A2SD included. 1) How do I create a 2nd partition, and 2)when installing apps, how do I specify to install to the partition vs. the internal memory?

Thx.... :)

[Guest shenshang]

also, if you have more space internally, you have more space for compache :)

[Guest franciswills]

also, if you have more space internally, you have more space for compache :)

Compcache runs in RAM, not on the ROM

[Guest Higgsy]

With titanium backup portibility is no longer an issue. I no longer use apps2sd

[Guest deeone]

Ok, another newbie question... I'm running modaco 2.2 ROM for CDMA Hero with A2SD included. 1) How do I create a 2nd partition, and 2)when installing apps, how do I specify to install to the partition vs. the internal memory?

Thx.... ;)

1) You can create an ext partition trough the recovery screen. Hold down HOME + POWER, select PARTITION SD CARD (just search the forum for the right sizes of each partition on your sd card or you can use my settings for a 8Gb card - 0 Mb SWAP - 1Gb EXT2 - the rest FAT32)

2) You don't need that. After you set up an ext partition on your sd card, the phone will install every application to that partition, no need to specify

[Guest Arthur Hucksake]

1) You can create an ext partition trough the recovery screen. Hold down HOME + POWER, select PARTITION SD CARD (just search the forum for the right sizes of each partition on your sd card or you can use my settings for a 8Gb card - 0 Mb SWAP - 1Gb EXT2 - the rest FAT32)

2) You don't need that. After you set up an ext partition on your sd card, the phone will install every application to that partition, no need to specify

Hi there, sorry to butt in but got to ask.

I have installed Modaco 3.1 which is suppose to include A2SD, have a EXT2 partition created on the card. Within the OS when I install an app it appears to be putting them into the phones internal memory.

Any idea why?

Confirmed this by checking the usage space before and after an install. ;)

[Guest kendon]

Hi there, sorry to butt in but got to ask.

I have installed Modaco 3.1 which is suppose to include A2SD, have a EXT2 partition created on the card. Within the OS when I install an app it appears to be putting them into the phones internal memory.

Any idea why?

Confirmed this by checking the usage space before and after an install. ;)

the cache resides in the phone memory. this has been covered, please do a search for "apps2sd not working".

[Guest starfarer]

Firstly, let's be clear here - I am not slagging off anyone's work, quite the contrary in fact. Big thank you to Paul, teknologist and all the other that have made my phone so much better and faster.

What is the point of Apps2SD?

The only one I can see is that if you have a *lot* of apps, you might run out of space on the phone's ROM. In this case, having more space on an SD partition obviously makes sense.

A lot of people seem to think it improves performance. I can see no reason why this would be the case since it's ROM space, not RAM, that these apps are occupying. If I'm wrong, please correct me but make sure you explain why. On a slight tangent to this, does anyone have any read/write speed benchmarks of the phone's ROM vs. Class 2/4/6/X SD cards? ie. Do apps launch faster from the SD card?

Thanks for your help.

why ask when you know the answer. This was never to improve speed ( i don't know where you getting impression that this is about performance related, never heard here) but to "accomodate" ever increasing android market and possibly one day you could be keeping couple hundred apps on phone without worrying about limited memory(ROM). It's another thing that most ppls visiting sites like modaco and xda are trying new image every now and then, and completely wiping all datas on phone.

Compcache and swap are having mixed reactions, relating to use of phones especially in performance. AFAIK, never came across a post where APP2SD was blamed for lagginess or slowness on phones. Remember that speed (like 4/6) specified for cards are the write speeds while read speeds are normally 3x or higher than writes. Agree probably much slower than ROM's but all's not lost if loads 1 seconds later.

Ask this: Do apps launch *noticeably* faster from ROM than on SD with APP2SD?

Good thing is whatever the arguments, all media files like photos, video and music will always be read from SD card ;). Ouch this is slow.......