Help Can the SD card contents slow down my phone?

[Deleted User]

I've had the Razr Maxx for two years and it has slowed almost to the point where my Droid was 2 years in (ahem, Motorola conspiracy?) and I noticed my SD card is chock full of folders and files for apps I've uninstalled, and I wonder if all of that unused crap is just slowing down the phone.

I can delete them manually but is there an Android feature or app that can do that? Also, could this problem also be happening on the phone's internal memory? I can access the 8GB ROM from Windows and delete manually there but I can't delete the other 8GB phone system folders (see Wikipedia if you don't know what I'm talking about).

 

[Rukbat]

Files stored (on the SD card, on the phone's main storage, anywhere) can't slow your phone down (unless there's no storage left, and the operating system needs some storage). Turn the phone off, remove the SD card, turn the phone on, and you'll probably see the same slowdown.

Boot into recovery, clear cache, clear Dalvik cache. Restart the phone. (The first restart may take a long time - depending on the CPU speed, up to 5 or 10 minutes.) That should give you as clean a phone as you can get, and nothing will be slowing it down. If you then turn it off, put the SD card back in and turn it on, you won't notice the SD card slowing it down.

One problem is that as time goes on, apps are developed on faster phones (no dev uses a 300MHz CPU phone ny more), so the older phones (1.2GHz) is just a bit slow for mid-2014) run the newer apps slower than they ran the older apps. If you update an app that used to run fast, but the updating was done on a faster phone, the developer may not have noticed that some of the things he added slow the app down on older phones, something barely noticeable on newer ones. It's not a conspiracy that we "should be" changing phones every 2 years - if we want to run the latest apps all the time, we almost have to. (A solitaire game I used to play on a 2011 phone runs so fast on my Note 3 with a fast ROM that the hints are almost useless - they fly by so fast you can't see them. The reverse happens too - new apps crawl on older phones.)

 

[Deleted User]

If a card is formatted in FAT32 (which Windows used before NT) and must traverse an index or a file system to find files, can't that slow down the phone? Doesn't having a 9/10 full hard drive in Windows slow down retrieval?

 

[RBEmerson]

Quite right, the more files to be dealt with, the slower the response. However I don't think that's the real villain. It's a mix of the processor (there are fast ones out there now), small RAM (funny how 1Gb was da bomb not long ago) and just plain creeping feature-itis. As apps become more and more complex and feature laden, the more space they need, the more cycles they need, and so on. It's really little different than what's seen in PC's and Macs that are a few years old.

You can use junk file and cache cleaners. I use Clean Sweep but it's really bad for dumb features. Yes, I follow football and the World Cup, but do I really need Clean Sweep to give me World Cup info?!? Talk about creeping feature-itis! Anyway, clean out junk, clean up the cache, and clear out trash in RAM. Learn how to re-build the swap partition. Cycle power regularly. All of them help, but, sadly, this puppy is just plain showing its age.

 

[Deleted User]

I disabled Google+ which sped it up, uninstalled some other apps I wasn't using, moved almost 2 GigaBytes of files (camera and app backups) over from the internal ROM (1GB remaining out of 8) to the SDcard (15GB remaining out of 32), cleared cache, then deleted some other things in the internal ROM (now at 5GB remaining) and now the phone runs fast.

I notice if I back up all apps (I use Android Assistant for that and process list) or that I have a lot of pictures and video on the internal ROM that the phone starts running slow again, so I think that definitely has something to do with it. In my tests, moving or deleting files there had the greatest effect.

What I don't understand is why transitions run slow, pulling down the status bar runs slow, and just swiping the home screen runs slow if the internal ROM is getting close to full. All of that stuff should be stored in RAM and Android should not be continually scanning the ROM while doing basic operations.

 

[RBEmerson]

Er, "internal ROM" doesn't change or fill up. ROM = Read Only Memory

You're better off moving JPG's, MP3's, MP4's, etc. to the SD or, if practical, off the machine altogether. Emptying out internal storage leaves room for "scratch pad" (stuff written while events happen, and dropped later) activity. Changing the screen wholesale (e.g., dropping the status bar, swiping to change home screens) means a lot of storing, recovering, and redrawing - busy, busy, busy. Clearing out more room for storing stuff briefly speeds things up some.

But, again, keep in mind this phone is simply not the Fastest Draw in the West.

 

[Deleted User]

Er, "internal ROM" doesn't change or fill up. ROM = Read Only Memory

Well, ROM is just what Android Assistant calls it, which is the app I use to view all that crap. I've heard ROM used for just "internal memory", which is all the 8GB is (actually 16GB total but Motorola partitions it and the other 8GB is phone system memory, !3GB reserved for app installs and whatnot, and those partitions are read-only to me, the user). It's complicated with Motorola (and pretty useful) but I'll attach screenshots to show you what I mean.

You're better off moving JPG's, MP3's, MP4's, etc. to the SD or, if practical, off the machine altogether. Emptying out internal storage leaves room for "scratch pad" (stuff written while events happen, and dropped later) activity. Changing the screen wholesale (e.g., dropping the status bar, swiping to change home screens) means a lot of storing, recovering, and redrawing - busy, busy, busy. Clearing out more room for storing stuff briefly speeds things up some.

I don't have a lot of choice on this matter since Motorola decided to store things the apps save (camera, podcast player, anything apps create) to the internal 8GB user memory while letting me do what I want with the SD card basically.

But, again, keep in mind this phone is simply not the Fastest Draw in the West.

It was when I bought it and demo'd it at the store and used it for a long time but has lagged the last bunch of months or so, and I'm trying to figure out why. I think it is memory-related but if you know of an app to track CPU and memory usage over time I would love to know what it is!