Hi,
I have noticed that my Nexus' performance starts to drop after some hours on: going from one home screen to the other becomes quite choppy, and so do the animations of opening an application.
Have you guys noticed that too, or is it just me?
It was like this for me until I bought Advanced Task Manager. I have it auto end applications that I don't need to run all the time. It runs much better now.
The issue is RAM. The kernel that shipped with the Nexus One doesn't support the full 512MB of RAM. However, CyanogenMod 5.0-beta4 does and the difference in speed is amazing. With 26 apps running I have 167MB free atm.
But like stickerbob said, you should have Advanced Task Manager at the least.
Deathwish238 said:
The issue is RAM. The kernel that shipped with the Nexus One doesn't support the full 512MB of RAM. However, CyanogenMod 5.0-beta4 does and the difference in speed is amazing. With 26 apps running I have 167MB free atm.
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Click to collapse
I don't get it. Isn't Android supposed to kill unused apps when it's running out of RAM?
frandavid100 said:
I don't get it. Isn't Android supposed to kill unused apps when it's running out of RAM?
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Click to collapse
Yep but some people just don't get that, ah well...
efeltee said:
Yep but some people just don't get that, ah well...
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Click to collapse
Well, that doesn't really explain the performance drops. Does the phone run out of RAM, or not? It seems to be snappy again after a reboot, so there must be something.
frandavid100 said:
I don't get it. Isn't Android supposed to kill unused apps when it's running out of RAM?
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Click to collapse
That is what I have read, but it did not work for me. I downloaded the free version of advanced task man to troubleshoot the problem and found that most of my apps were still running in the background even when my ram was down to 10-20mb. That is about when the phone would start acting up on me. When I ended the tasks the phone would act normal again. So I just broke down and bought the app for $.99. If you do this make sure you exclude some system apps, if you don't your phone could freeze while it is trying to restart them.
10-20mb free is normal operation. This is how the OS is designed to operate, linux and even windows7 now also operate in this fashion (show very little 'free' memory). there is no performance problem with low free memory, purely a misconception on modern memory managment. Whats going on is that you have a buggy application, which is why 'killing' apps looks to be resolving your issue. You're only resolving the symptom, not the problem.
I never kill apps and have had weeks of uptime without any slow down. This gets rehashed over and over again by people claiming task killers help performance. The reality is they do nothing for performance, only nice to have around for that great once and a while an app runs away from you, or in troubleshooting if you have a poorly written app. It should not be anyones habit to do a kill all on a regular basis, if it were the OS would do this automatically.
btw, compcache has been known to cause this slowdown over time issue, it has since been removed from most of the popular custom baked rom's.
frandavid100 said:
I don't get it. Isn't Android supposed to kill unused apps when it's running out of RAM?
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Click to collapse
Yes it does...
bofslime said:
10-20mb free is normal operation. This is how the OS is designed to operate, linux and even windows7 now also operate in this fashion (show very little 'free' memory). there is no performance problem with low free memory, purely a misconception on modern memory managment. Whats going on is that you have a buggy application, which is why 'killing' apps looks to be resolving your issue. You're only resolving the symptom, not the problem.
I never kill apps and have had weeks of uptime without any slow down. This gets rehashed over and over again by people claiming task killers help performance. The reality is they do nothing for performance, only nice to have around for that great once and a while an app runs away from you, or in troubleshooting if you have a poorly written app. It should not be anyones habit to do a kill all on a regular basis, if it were the OS would do this automatically.
btw, compcache has been known to cause this slowdown over time issue, it has since been removed from most of the popular custom baked rom's.
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Click to collapse
Well then there must be many buggy applications. I had to rely on Advanced Task Manager to keep my G1 running acceptably fast. The N1 slows down without its full RAM available so I needed to use Advanced Task Manager then too.
If the RAM is not the issue, why does having the extra 200 MB available make the phone run much smoother with 20+ apps running?
frandavid100 said:
I don't get it. Isn't Android supposed to kill unused apps when it's running out of RAM?
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Click to collapse
well technically no, it reallocates what is being used and frees up memory for programs currently running but non the less the OS manages itself
personally i close apps that i do not have going with the task manager. i seem to notice a performance difference if i do it manually, it takes 2-3 extra taps for peace of mind rather than relying on the OS to figure it out for me...
Deathwish238 said:
The issue is RAM. The kernel that shipped with the Nexus One doesn't support the full 512MB of RAM. However, CyanogenMod 5.0-beta4 does and the difference in speed is amazing. With 26 apps running I have 167MB free atm.
But like stickerbob said, you should have Advanced Task Manager at the least.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The speed benefits of CM's ROM isn't due to the HIGHMEM supporting kernel, but rather other tweeks he's done with his build. Extra ram is nice, but there is certainly no limitation with the 213 or so userspace memory that is available now. Android itself does not even use this memory, it has its own reserved memory space, userspace memory is only for applications to be loaded in. And there is speed for keeping as much of your applications loaded in memory as possible.
swetland said:
Roughly 220MB is available to userspace in the shipping build (ERD79).
Quite a lot of memory is dedicated to the radio firmware (41MB), dsp firmware (32MB), display surfaces (32MB), gpu (3MB), camera (8MB), a/v buffers (41MB), and dsp buffers. Much of this needs to be set aside for these specific tasks due to hardware requirements of very large physically contiguous buffers which can be difficult or impossible to obtain after boot once the physical memory space gets fragmented.
The big limitation though is that the Linux kernel needs to do a 1:1 physical:virtual map of general purpose memory used by the kernel and userspace (which excludes the special purpose stuff described above). This eats into the available kernel virtual address space, which is also needed for cross process shared memory used by the binder, etc. Run out of virtual memory and things get unhappy.
In 2.6.32, HIGHMEM support for ARM will allow us to avoid this requirement for a 1:1 mapping which will allow us to increase memory available to userspace without running the system out of virtual memory adddress space.
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Click to collapse
The speed difference I'm talking about is what I experienced when running CM beta3 and CM beta3 w/ highmem. The difference was huge. I assumed the change was mainly attributed to the double RAM available.
Even now with the full RAM available, things run faster when I end the other apps running. It's not necessary, but the difference is there.
It would be nice to be able to pinpoint which apps caused slow downs.
The best way I've seen this put I found in a thread where someone wanted to disable apps from auto-starting entirely. I saved it, because I though it was very elegant way to explain androids mem management.
equid0x said:
I just wanted to chime in here about the whole apps on startup thing....
Android has the concept of services which are programs that typically have a frontend piece, like a GUI for IM that you would normally use, that only runs when you are using it, and a background piece, the service, which is constantly running to keep you connected to your IM servers. This will account for some portion of the things you see running on startup, depending on how many apps you have installed, and whether or not they were written to run as a service.
There are also some, usually older, android programs that existed before "services" were really used.. that basically use triggers to keep reloading themselves. These programs are less efficient, and probably should be re-written to use the official service method of operation, caveat emptor.
Android also makes several modifications to the stock process handling that comes with any Linux kernel, which is already radically different from what most would be used to seeing on Windows as it is. Android attempts to keep commonly used applications running(loaded into memory), but in a sleeping state (using no cpu), so that they may be quickly resumed on request. Android also contains some agressive modifications to the behavior of the OOM(out of memory) task killer in Linux, that seem to cause it to keep applications running until nearly all memory is consumed, killing apps it deems unnecessary only when absolutely necessary. However, Android also supports a methodology of saving the running state of a program, so that if it is killed due to an OOM condition, it may be restarted with relevant data restored, to give the appearance of never having been killed at all.
This functionality is not all to alien to Linux as a platform in general, though Android has many modifications which tend to favor aggressive app management in memory, and less so filesystem cache. This was likely a design choice made to suit the low-speed/low memory platforms Android targets.
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Good read.
So then given that...only services running should slow down the phone and not the background apps running.
However, this doesn't really answer the OP's question. If it's not a memory issue...what's causing his slowdowns?
Could be too many widgets on the home screen, I don't run that many but its possible that while in an app for a while, and switching back to home the OS may have to kill a whole bunch of apps to allow it to reload all the widgets on the home screen.
I tested this, and loaded the crap out of my home screens with widgets, and then launched a game. When I exited the game there was a good 500ms - 800ms delay in my homescreens from displaying anything other than the background. However, after it loaded, scrolling between screens looks smooth. The new kernel with highmem support can help this, but I would suspect some crazy widget filled homescreen with a 3rd party live wallpaper (star's configured with too many stars) and all of that combined could be an issue even still. Apple combats this by allowing only one app at a time, they know people will go overboard if allowed.
Well, that doesn't really explain the performance drops. Does the phone run out of RAM, or not? It seems to be snappy again after a reboot, so there must be something.
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Click to collapse
There's probably no easy answer to this question. There could be IO contention, a runaway process, high CPU usage, a memory leak, shoddy code in some app, etc etc... One would really have to take a look at the whole state of the system at the time the problem is happening to be able to ascertain what is causing the slowdown.
The phenomenon is in no way unique to Android. I'm sure nearly everyone is familiar with the common complaint "my computer is running slow". The reasons that can happen on a common PC are the very same reasons that can be happening here, and unfortunately there are many of those reasons. While in many cases, throwing memory at the issue may appear to solve the problem temporarily, it often is not a permanent fix.
The amount of userspace memory available really amounts to 1 thing and 1 thing only -> the total number of running processes that we can keep totally in memory at any given time. On stock android, slowdown due to an OOM condition should be minimal, since stock android doesn't swap. Discounting any other bottlenecks, there is a practical limit to the number of programs once would be able to run in the memory space that is available. Realistically speaking, android programs tend to be fairly small, so you'd really have to be running a lot of them to exhaust this space. It is far more likely one or 2 poorly written programs are hogging huge amounts of memory (and probably other resources), which is causing constant killing and restarting of other apps you are trying to run concurrently. You end up with contention on the slow flash, resulting in poor performance.
You can't even really compare the Nexus One to the G1 in this regard, because the G1 truly is terribly deprived of memory. Though, the argument in both cases could really be made that you are attempting to run the hardware beyond its design specifications...
Its been my experience that the culprit is usually one or 2 specific programs. Sometimes the best, although inconvenient, way to figure out which programs these are, is to keep watch of your usage habits, and if you suspect something is the problem, uninstall it, and see if the issue persists. Its time consuming but there really isn't any better way to figure it out without using all kinds of tools that android doesn't really provide convenient access to. There are a few apps on the market that help with this but I am not sure what they are called offhand.
Programs that were identified as sources of slowdown for me have been:
Weatherbug
The Weather Channel
Calorie Counter
Locale
SMS Popup
10000
USA Today
National Geographic Wallpapers
CNN News Widget
Streamfurious
Nav4All
Waze
Just about every app with Admob Ads
And this is really just what I can think off offhand... there are more...
equid0x said:
There's probably no easy answer to this question. There could be IO contention, a runaway process, high CPU usage, a memory leak, shoddy code in some app, etc etc... One would really have to take a look at the whole state of the system at the time the problem is happening to be able to ascertain what is causing the slowdown.
The phenomenon is in no way unique to Android. I'm sure nearly everyone is familiar with the common complaint "my computer is running slow". The reasons that can happen on a common PC are the very same reasons that can be happening here, and unfortunately there are many of those reasons. While in many cases, throwing memory at the issue may appear to solve the problem temporarily, it often is not a permanent fix.
The amount of userspace memory available really amounts to 1 thing and 1 thing only -> the total number of running processes that we can keep totally in memory at any given time. On stock android, slowdown due to an OOM condition should be minimal, since stock android doesn't swap. Discounting any other bottlenecks, there is a practical limit to the number of programs once would be able to run in the memory space that is available. Realistically speaking, android programs tend to be fairly small, so you'd really have to be running a lot of them to exhaust this space. It is far more likely one or 2 poorly written programs are hogging huge amounts of memory (and probably other resources), which is causing constant killing and restarting of other apps you are trying to run concurrently. You end up with contention on the slow flash, resulting in poor performance.
You can't even really compare the Nexus One to the G1 in this regard, because the G1 truly is terribly deprived of memory. Though, the argument in both cases could really be made that you are attempting to run the hardware beyond its design specifications...
Its been my experience that the culprit is usually one or 2 specific programs. Sometimes the best, although inconvenient, way to figure out which programs these are, is to keep watch of your usage habits, and if you suspect something is the problem, uninstall it, and see if the issue persists. Its time consuming but there really isn't any better way to figure it out without using all kinds of tools that android doesn't really provide convenient access to. There are a few apps on the market that help with this but I am not sure what they are called offhand.
Programs that were identified as sources of slowdown for me have been:
Weatherbug
The Weather Channel
Calorie Counter
Locale
SMS Popup
10000
USA Today
National Geographic Wallpapers
CNN News Widget
Streamfurious
Nav4All
Waze
Just about every app with Admob Ads
And this is really just what I can think off offhand... there are more...
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Click to collapse
I'm banking on it being an issue with an app that the OP has installed as well...not the phone or Android. I have only a handful of tried and true apps, and haven't experienced a slowdown even after 150 hours without a reboot.
OP... start uninstalling apps a couple at a time and wait several hours in between to narrow down the problem app.
I can't speak for the OP, but when I was having that problem I had 5 widgets running on my home screen. The Google Search, Sports Tap, Power Control, Calendar, and The Small Weather Channel. Does this seem like too much? I hope not.
stickerbob said:
I can't speak for the OP, but when I was having that problem I had 5 widgets running on my home screen. The Google Search, Sports Tap, Power Control, Calendar, and The Small Weather Channel. Does this seem like too much? I hope not.
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Click to collapse
It's not just widgets that you should be thinking about... any app you've installed can throw something off.
stickerbob said:
I can't speak for the OP, but when I was having that problem I had 5 widgets running on my home screen. The Google Search, Sports Tap, Power Control, Calendar, and The Small Weather Channel. Does this seem like too much? I hope not.
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Click to collapse
I removed the weather & news widget and the phone seems much faster now. I'll keep it like that for a day, see if it stays fast.
You're busy and don't have time to wait, which is why you need to stop reading this thread and get back to organizing your Pogs. Rate this thread to express how the Google Pixel 3 XL performs when multitasking. A higher rating indicates that the Google Pixel 3 XL keeps many apps in memory so that they don't need to reload, and that when moving between apps, transitions are smooth and performance is excellent.
Then, drop a comment if you have anything to add!
Does a poor job of memory management. Apps to be reloaded. I am quite surprised this is occurring.
Chrome pages rarely stay in memory even when jumping to one or two other apps for a short bit. Even the messaging app dumps out frequently. These are Google's own apps too, what's their excuse?
Slightly off topic but I love how safari on iOS devices keeps the last page stored so hitting the back button to the last webpage is instant vs chrome having to reload a page
Seems quite good to me. I loaded Spotify, messages, Viber, what's app, chrome and nest and no reloading. Seem to normally have about 750mb free
I haven't seen much reloading. I do mostly use apps that start each time I open them (like games like Clash Royale, etc), so I'm sure that has something to do with it, but for my most used normal apps I can open Gmail, Chrome, Instagram, YouTube, G+, and some others, and rarely will an app need to pause to reload. They mostly open right where I left off. Maybe if I cycle eight or so apps is when I see a pause/reload.
Seems great to me. I can swap between Discord/Camera/Snapseed/Twitter/YouTube music with no reloading. Taking pictures or videos doesn't pause or completely stop YouTube music like I've seen some YouTubers/reviews comment. I even bumped it up to about as stressful as I could - HDR on, highest mp, take raw, nothing I could do would get the music in the BG to close
I will experience redrawing when I open a game such as FGO or Dragalia Lost, but that shouldn't be shocking, in my opinion
I've tried both streaming apps and local playback of a downloaded podcast and have gotten process kills for every situation. How is it some people have no issue and others don't if it's just a software issue?
Only thing I've noticed is aggressively closing Pandora is I've been out of my car a few minutes. It's a little annoying but doesn't really bother me. Spotify and slacker stay open.
Other than that I haven't had the other issues reported like the camera closing Spotify etcetera
could this be related to the SWAP thats being used aggresively? if someone has root maybe they can test disabling swap, and changing the swappiness value should make things perform better.
Zenoran said:
I've tried both streaming apps and local playback of a downloaded podcast and have gotten process kills for every situation. How is it some people have no issue and others don't if it's just a software issue?
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Click to collapse
I've found it to be due to Adaptive battery. Turn the adaptive battery setting for the app off.
virtyx said:
could this be related to the SWAP thats being used aggresively? if someone has root maybe they can test disabling swap, and changing the swappiness value should make things perform better.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
How is SWAP adjusted with root?
Battery management seems to be the culprit. I have turned it off as it makes my phone almost unusable; it allows me to use two apps, MOST of the time, but it constantly closes everything else, even when I have told it NOT to optimize specific programs. This is a terrible user experience. TERRIBLE. I hope they make the program less aggressive with a future software update.
As an aside, this was not how things were with Oreo on the Pixel 2 XL, and things weren't this way with the first release of Pie on the XL 2, either. However, I started seeing this after an update to Pie on the XL 2, and it has been constant on the XL 3.
rohmbd said:
How is SWAP adjusted with root?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
there should be a magisk module
'torpedo' something i think its called
you can also change swappiness to 0 (i think its in /proc/sys/vm )
if you have root you can try swapoff -a in terminal with su
report back on your finding please
RAM management is worse than phones from 2016
So I just got my pixel last week and one of the biggest issues is the RAM.
Sometimes I'll only have THREE things open, Chrome, Podcast Addict, and YouTube for isntance. And the pixel will kill off the podcast (while I'm listening to it still).
The same thing happens when I'm browsing the web, and want to take a picture, boom, kills the music I'm listening too.
It's a BIG issue, happens daily for me.
virtyx said:
there should be a magisk module
'torpedo' something i think its called
you can also change swappiness to 0 (i think its in /proc/sys/vm )
if you have root you can try swapoff -a in terminal with su
report back on your finding please
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I did that last night - swap is off and, while I'm still getting reloads of Chrome tabs (really the only negative thing I noticed before), the phone *is* a bit more responsive. I've switched back and forth between swap and no swap, and there's definitely a non-placebo difference. I'd give it a shot if you're rooted (I used the Torpedo module in Magisk).
Roll3r said:
I did that last night - swap is off and, while I'm still getting reloads of Chrome tabs (really the only negative thing I noticed before), the phone *is* a bit more responsive. I've switched back and forth between swap and no swap, and there's definitely a non-placebo difference. I'd give it a shot if you're rooted (I used the Torpedo module in Magisk).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
thats great news!
how many chrome tabs are you using? is it only in chrome tabs that the reloading happens? how about recent apps?
im sure there are a few settings in /proc/sys/vm that can be adjusted to get better ram management
virtyx said:
thats great news!
how many chrome tabs are you using? is it only in chrome tabs that the reloading happens? how about recent apps?
im sure there are a few settings in /proc/sys/vm that can be adjusted to get better ram management
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I haven't kept track of *any* of that. The phone just feels a bit (hate this adjective) snappier. And from what I understand (don't have the links in front of me) adjusting the LMK settings is going to be difficult.
I keep getting low memory warnings while playing wgt golf. Sucks
is this issue too bad on pixel 3?
i use a pixel 1 xl now and wants to buy a new phone.
getting really concerned and thinking if i should just buy a note 9 or not.
what do you guys suggest?
wtharp2 said:
Battery management seems to be the culprit. I have turned it off as it makes my phone almost unusable; it allows me to use two apps, MOST of the time, but it constantly closes everything else, even when I have told it NOT to optimize specific programs. This is a terrible user experience. TERRIBLE. I hope they make the program less aggressive with a future software update.
As an aside, this was not how things were with Oreo on the Pixel 2 XL, and things weren't this way with the first release of Pie on the XL 2, either. However, I started seeing this after an update to Pie on the XL 2, and it has been constant on the XL 3.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You turned off the adaptive battery feature?