Help Something is slowing stuff waaaay down

[sideman44]

I have a Samsung Mesmerize (US Cellular) running Gingerbread. I use Pandora a lot. In the past I had no trouble with it, but something I installed (maybe Soundhound or a Gin Rummy game) has slowed it way down, like over a minute to load a song when I start up or hit "next".

Some backstory: A while back I notice Pandora slowed way down, and then noticed that pretty much ALL data had slowed down. Web sites, the market,etc. Forget about Youtube... video would never come up. I went in to USC, they poked around, completely wiped the phone and reinstalled Gingerbread. No difference. They finally just gave me a replacement under warranty.

So, I'm going along, Pandora is happy, and I'm taking my time installing apps; hoping to see if any particular app causes the problem. After a couple of weeks I think everything's cool. Then I installed Soundhound and a Gin Rummy game from Tesseract Mobile. Next day Pandora, youtube, market.. all pretty much unusable. I've uninstalled both, but it didn't help.

Since USC wiped the previous phone, the only thing I can think is that it's something on my sd card, but I have no idea what.

Any suggestions?

 

[LaTuFu]

In addition to uninstalling the apps, I would go into settings, applications, manage. Clear the cache on every single app you use. See if that unmucks anything for you.

 

[sideman44]

Thanks LaTuFu. Actually I did a factory reset, so there aren't any apps other than Pandora to clear.

I don't get how a problem like this could persist through a wipe and reinstall of the OS, but that sure seems like what happened with the last phone. I was thinking maybe something on the sd card, but the that same card went into this phone, and it worked fine for a while.

 

[tritiumman]

LaTuFu,

How do you clear the RAM in the phone?

Thanks in advance

 

[LaTuFu]

There are several RAM cleaning utilities available in the market, but I don't know how effective they are. Android OS utilizes RAM in a totally different way than Microsoft. It will automatically clear out its own RAM if it needs the room, unlike Windows.

Clearing cached data for applications, on the other hand, is not done automatically. You have to go into the settings/applications/manage menu to see the apps and then look at each app's cache. You could also download a cache cleaner utility to do this.

 

[tritiumman]

I got it.. go to task manager> click on the RAM tab> click clear ram. the phone does seem to be using a constant 324 mb out of the 348 mb of ram. interesting

 

[dixie_boysles]

mine is ALWAYS near the end of the bar in the ram manager....uggg

 

[LaTuFu]

Again, Android is totally different than Windows. Your RAM list should always be full. Android leaves your most recent applications in RAM, in the event you "multi-task" back to it and want to pick up where you left off. If you aren't using that app, it isn't making any demands on the CPU.

If you have given an app permission to operate in the background, it will reside in RAM and will make periodic demands on the CPU, whether you use it actively or not. (GMail checking mail).

Using a task killer app will not help, since any app that you've granted background permissions will simply restart the next time it needs to run a check, and re-insert itself into RAM. This actually demands more of the CPU and the battery than it remaining dormant in RAM.

If your phone needs more RAM to run an app than it currently has available, it simply kicks out the oldest app in the RAM.

RAM usage does not equal system lag or battery drain.

Display usage and CPU usage are the biggest drains on a battery. CPU usage is the biggest demand on system performance.

 

[ko6qj]

So, How do you or can you stop processes from running in the background?

 

[matt88si]

You can operate the processes by going in to your Task Manager app which could be found in your app tray. Unfortunately, the Mesmerize doesn't have (that I know of) any stock privilages to disable constantly running processes in the background. The only way to do this is to download 3rd party task kill app, but I highly recommend against it (as of late, Android enthusiasts are turning down task killers because it actually hurts the phone more than it helps it).

On the Electrify, however, you can tell an app to automatically close itself once its been inactive for 2 minutes. A great feature in my opinion.

 

[LaTuFu]

So, How do you or can you stop processes from running in the background?

By not allowing them "rights" to check data in the background in the first place.

It will defeat the purpose of some apps (what good is having email on your phone if you don't allow the program to check your mail?), but that is a decision you'll need to make when you install a new app.

 

[matt88si]

Typically if you have a lot of applications running in the background (regardless of if its on a computer or a phone) it will slow down the system. Seeing as how the Mesmerize functions off of a single-core 1Ghz processor and only 1GB of RAM (if I'm wrong about the RAM, my apologies) having a lot of applications running in the background would severly hurt the performance of the phone.

I suggest you review your apps and see which ones require a constant data connection and decide weither you really need the application or not. Some frequently downloaded apps that require constant data connection are Gmail, K9, Weather apps, social networks, RSS feeds, news apps, and some game apps require data for push notifications.

 

[LaTuFu]

The problem is, a lot of apps now do background automatically. You have to pay attention and read the permissions it is asking for on install.

I had the Amazon store app on my phone since the day it came out. A recent update changed its permissions, allowing it to give you daily status bar updates on app updates. If you have uninstalled any app you had downloaded from them, you start getting a daily update to let you know it was available for install. No way to turn that off in settings, so Amazon app store came off my phone last week. Ditto Facebook and a couple of other apps that did the same thing.