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Guide To optimizing your rooted Android for performance

MustangLife

Well-Known Member
Jan 5, 2015
165
38
Hey all. So after about 2-3 months of fully testing my phone on 4.1.2 to 4.4.2 kitkat with countless hours of testing and documenting apps, framework modules, different settings, and not to mention a large amount of time just in research my phone is performing the best that it can be. This guide will have your phone also running very snappy, smooth, fast and dependable.

This guide will help anybody from beginners on up. Some of these tips you guys already know. Some tips I've proven to work others will say its not good because they read in a forum a year ago they weren't supposed to do this or that, etc. Everything I'm going to mention I'm running and I can vouch for.

Prerequisites - Rooted Android running 4.1.2 and up. I'm running on a deodexed 4.4.2 kitkat rom Debloated.

First thing I'm going to mention is a CPU tool. I'm currently running 3C Toolbox Pro (Android Tuner) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ccc71.at&hl=en this is a advanced cpu tuner and everything else tuner, but if you want to run a basic beginner tool than Device Control and SetCPU to in fact work but they were lacking the advanced controls I wanted.

The main reason to have 3C Toolbox Pro is to change the CPU Frequency, governor, and i/o scheduler. Different phones have different gov and scheduler options. I chose to run a performance governor and noop i/o scheduler. Both these options are opinionated and some like other options but these options work for me. My phone is a dual core 1.2 Ghz so this has my processors both running at max. Stock or factory is on demand and the 2nd core is basically only used when need be. Running at performance and both cores on. The phone is definately snappy and responsive. I love it. After 2 months of running my CPU like this. I've experience no ill side effects. I get a full day of use out of my phone and I'm a power user. With screen brightness at min to about 25% I can get about 7 hours of screen on constant use. A full day and night of standby time and normal back and forth texting and whatnot use and be around 15-20% battery at bed time. The phone never gets hot. The cpu temp when just being on is around 85-95 degrees fahrenheit and during power/peak times it maxes at 130 degrees after a hour or two of constant screen on use. Tuning the cpu is by far my fav android mod of all next to the Greenify app which I'll talk about shortly. I'll talk about the i/o schedulers also. My phone only has the option of noop, deadline, cfq, etc, For what your phone has you'll have to do a little research but the 3 i mentioned are pretty common. Noop scheduler is ideal for our phones. You guys running quad cores I would play with the cores and different frequencies. 2 Cores running max is enough for multi tasking but if you guys also run a performance gov. a difference in overall performance will definately be felt. I'm not going to get into a tutorial on how to use 3C Toolbox Pro but the app is detailed and very user friendly with a good website with a brief description on each tool built inside. You can also have profiles built into the app with screen off settings to help your battery life. I'm able to get about 5-6% loss over night with my phone asleep.

Next I'll talk about Web browsing. I've tested all the browsers from Chrome to Opera to Next, CM, Puffin, Dolphin and still by far choose to Google Chrome. I myself am running Chrome Beta because some features we tend to get 4 to 6 weeks before the rest of the world does and its stable. But for the people running Chrome which is a dominant amount of people there are hidden features inside called Chrome Flags. These are experimental features but are table features and definately give you a crisp and fast user experience.

Go to your chrome browser and copy in Chrome://Flags

You will be redirected to the Chrome://Flags settings page. Next, look for the flag called“Maximum tiles for interest area Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, Android”.

Tap on default and choose 512 from the drop-down. If your device has less than 512 RAM, its best that you choose anything below that figure to prevent Chrome from taking over all of your device’s memory.

The default is 128 because Chrome is used with low end up to high end devices and they have to have a setting making it stable but not necessarilyv the best for performance.

Relaunch the browser for settings to take effect and notice the difference.

Next I'm gonna talk about Xposed frameworkhttp://repo.xposed.info/module/de.robv.android.xposed.installer .In a very brief beginner explanation. Its a app that lets you download apps that tweak the phone. Xposed framework is like Cydia to the Iphone. And the modules are like the Cydia tweaks.

Most don't know this but when a person exits an application by hitting the home button. It takes 5 seconds to launch another app. Which sucks for performance and multi tasking, especially for power users and you need to do something fast. The module is called StopSwitchDelay and it removes this 5 second delay. Another module lets you remove the screenshot delay also making the process all instant.

I'm bringing up the xposed modules now because of Greenify https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.oasisfeng.greenify&hl=en . Greenify is best used with xposed framework and the donated version for all features but non root users can also use it in a limited way. This app lets you hibernate system apps and user apps from waking and helps keep available ram. I love it because it keeps facebook and messenger from bothering me except when i get notifications. Gmail, youtube, etc seem to always be taking up RAM in my phone before I added Greenify. It only hibernates apps. It doesn't force them closed it keeps them from waking up for now reason. You will notice a increase in battery life and performance after adding and using this app. I want to mention this is not a task manager. Another module I want to mention is boot manager. This basically lets you choose what applications start on start up just like the windows option. Not a task manager either. But alot of apps automatically start on system start up and don't need to be.

Next go into Settings - Developer Options and these few things are gonna give your phone some noticeable speed. Window,transition, animations are on by default turn those off. Animator duration the same thing. Turn it off. Next enable GPU rendering. Alot of apps already do this but some don't. This lets your GPU use the UI rather than your CPU. Even guys on the Note 4 notice this is a definate performance increase. Its one of those it doesn't hurt options.

These little tips above you will definately feel and notice your device is better and smoother than it was. 3C Toolbox and other advanced cpu tuners offer so many options like entrophy, OOM, cache read size, that you can play with that I'm not going to get into because every phone is different.

Hope this helps a few guys out or maybe some newbies wanting to get a little more oomph out of there phone.

Thanks
Josh

I'm kinda tired as I typed this so I didn't proof read it. So there might be normal misspellings or punctuation
 
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