why are basic tasks so slow on the blade?

[Guest rbbrslmn]

I'm assuming this isnt just the blade and common to android, but what is it? I'm thinking of unzipping rars or moderate size (say 60mb) or deleting lots of selected folders with filer, they are surely very straightforward yet they take f-o-r-e-v-e-r

[Guest wbaw]

I'm assuming this isnt just the blade and common to android, but what is it? I'm thinking of unzipping rars or moderate size (say 60mb) or deleting lots of selected folders with filer, they are surely very straightforward yet they take f-o-r-e-v-e-r

sdcards aren't very fast, particularly when you're writing to them or erasing from them. if it's just a basic class 2 card then you might only be getting 2mb/s writes, about 50 times slower than a fast desktop hard drive, so your 60mb zip that might only take a second to extract on your desktop takes 30 seconds on your phone. even the fastest sd cards aren't very fast.

[Guest targetbsp]

At a guess I'd say Android doesn't have a disk cache? DOS users will remember deleting multiple files takes an absolute age on file systems with no disk cache. As Android generally uses APK files which are single files containing lots of little files I guess the overhead of disk caching was deemed not worth implementing.

Compression and decompression is going to be more a hardware limitation as it requires a lot of processing power. A cpu designed to run on a small battery for days isn't going to have anything like the performance of a multi core desktop when dealing with compression.

Edited December 29, 2010 by targetbsp

[Guest wbaw]

You must be a youngster. :( These aren't straightforward tasks for computers not optimised for them.

DOS users will remember deleting multiple files takes an absolute age on file systems with no disk cache. As Android generally uses APK files which are single files containing lots of little files I guess the overhead of disk caching was deemed not worth implementing.

Compression and decompression is going to be more a hardware limitation as it requires a lot of processing power. A cpu designed to run on a small battery for days isn't going to have anything like the performance of a multi core desktop when dealing with compression.

It's no problem for a 600mhz cpu, it has similar performance to a pc from 10 years ago & it is highly optimised for uncompressing files. apk files are compressed. i got more than 2mb/sec unzipping on my 486 & that had a tenth the cpu power of my cheap phone now & 4mb ram, not 512mb.

The bottleneck is the storage, writing to sdcards is slow, some more than others.

[Guest wbaw]

sorry, double post

Edited December 29, 2010 by wbaw

[Guest targetbsp]

Oh yeah. And flash cards suck. Forgot that :( I use a USB flash drive as a backup device for my PC and it's OK with big files but a series of small files brings it to its knees. So that probably accounts for the deleting lots of files thing as said above and also if you're unzipping something containing lots of small files rather than a few big ones.

i still reckon the CPU will suck at compression though. Especially as rar was specified rather than zip. Rar is much, much slower than zip. It's just computers are so fast these days that it doesn't matter. It could just be the SD card though. I guess you'd have to use some kind of performance monitor to see really.

Edited December 29, 2010 by targetbsp

[Guest rbbrslmn]

I've a class 4 kingston card, which I suppose isnt *that* much faster than a class 2.

as for the slowness of rar. I'm sure my old celeron 300 was quicker!