• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Help Screen Lag - Slowness problem with my TB

Drgnfyre

Lurker
Apr 8, 2011
9
0
I've had my TB 13 days now.

Generally, I've been very impressed by it. Battery life kind of stinks, but once I got the applications to not constantly check for updates, it got a lot better.

Several times now, (somewhere between 10 and 20 I think) I've ran into a situation where the phone is very slow to react to my input - I have a password on the phone, and you can see it sometimes there - pressing in my PIN, it will take 3-4 seconds to recognize that I pressed a number.

Then at the home screen, swiping left or right seems difficult. Sometimes it acts like I didn't do anything - other times it acts like I did a long press. I've had some luck when this happens by swiping a "small" amount - or wiggling, until the home screen starts to wiggle a little - indicating it is aware that i'm touching the screen - then i can swipe left / right. Launching applications is tricky - I have to hold it long enough for it to see that I did it, but not so long it thinks I'm doing a long hold and wanting to move the icon.

If I try and type something into the browser window, or messaging, or email - it will be similarly slow to react. I have to press a key just long enough to get it to register - kind of like the problem I'm having with the home screen icons.

Usually, when this happens, I just do a reboot. I've had a couple cases where this didn't seem to help at all and did a battery pull - so far that has cleared up the issue, but I've had to do that about 4 times, and I'd really like to -not- need to pull the battery this often.

It seems to happen more often in the evenings. I don't seem to run into the problem during the day.

Tonight when I got home I restarted the phone - wasn't being unresponsive, just kind of messing around. So I was on a fresh boot. An hour later or so, I'm playing Angry Birds, and everything is behaving badly - having a hard time getting it to launch the birds, and often when I tap a second time for the secondary action, it is delayed or doesn't register at all. Fighting this for 20 minutes.. I go to the home screen, and sure enough - difficult time swiping left or right..

I use Advanced Task Killer Free to close Angry birds and a couple other apps (I get mixed reviews on if I should be running a task killer or not - I installed it last week after running into the slow swipe thing again - have it set to low / safe and it runs every hour - things DID seem to be behaving better with it until tonight).

Anyway - killed off angry birds and a few other items - home screen still sluggish.

I lock the phone.. I'm thinking I'll just leave it in sluggish mode and take it to the store and maybe have them look at it.

Well, 30 seconds later I get an email on the thing - I unlock it, and now everything is behaving just fine.

The last time I ran into this, I ran a cpu meter (Mini Info) - it didn't show the cpu as being high load - think it was at 15% or so.

Phone isn't rooted or anything crazy - I do have a lot of games and apps loaded on it, but not a lot of them are set to check constantly or auto-run. (auto runs are advanced task killer, battery minder (only for the notification icon) juiceplotter, youmail, avservice, watchdog lite (it doesn't see any apps as going crazy), autowifienabler, traveler (lotus notes for corporate email).

I do have wifi at home and use auto-wifi enabler to enable that when i'm home. That seems to be where I run into the problem the most, but I have had it happen at work.


-

Has anyone else been running into slowness / lag in response issues? I did a search and didn't see anyone else mentioning this (slow got me a bunch of results regarding 3g, and lag got me nowhere).

Suggestions on what to try next? It's frustrating when it happens, but clearing it up seems to be random as to the fix.

Any additional details I can provide to help narrow down the issue? Not a rooted phone.

Any help you can provide would be much appreciated.

Thanks.
 
Why are you running a task killer with Froyo? Task killers drain battery and royally messes up the OS. With Android you can't have a bunch of junk apps on your phone. Some apps don't play nice with Android (lag/unresponsiveness) and some apps don't play nice with each other. I suggest you start uninstalling apps 1 by 1 until your problems go away. Must be your first phone with Android/Froyo.
 
Upvote 0
Why are you running a task killer with Froyo? Task killers drain battery and royally messes up the OS. With Android you can't have a bunch of junk apps on your phone. Some apps don't play nice with Android (lag/unresponsiveness) and some apps don't play nice with each other. I suggest you start uninstalling apps 1 by 1 until your problems go away. Must be your first phone with Android/Froyo.



I was actually going to suggest the opposite, restoring the phone from fresh and adding a few apps at a time, but maybe removing apps one at a time might be better.

It definitely sounds like he's got a lot of apps that while they sound like they would help his performance, a combination of them might be causing his issue, kind of like back when Anti-Virus first hit mainstream, some people believed that having more than 1 meant you were better protected.

The first 2 I'd look at removing are the Watchdog Lite, and the Autowifienabler since it would seem that those 2 would be in conflict with each other, one wanting to initialize, and the other trying to make sure it doesn't initialize, if the two do what they appear to do based on your short description and the name of the apps.
 
Upvote 0
TxGoat is right. a fresh start, and adding 1 or 2 apps at a time back would work great. I would even go a step further and urge you to add all the apps that "help" with battery life and lag, until the very last. I would also suggest that anti virus apps are unnecessary as well. As long as you only download apps from trusted developers, you shouldn't have to worry about things like malware.
 
Upvote 0
I only added the Task killer after I was experiencing this problem -as an effort to try and see if it was a running application causing the issue. Since killing all running tasks didn't clear up the issue, I don't think it's one app that's misbehaving.
Watchdog lite is a background app that takes snapshots of cpu usage - and tries to identify applications that are consistently taking up large portions of the cpu.
I don't really have any 'battery saver' applications - I have juiceplotter - that just keeps track of battery usage and gives me an estimation of battery life left.
Autowifi-enabler just turns on wifi in spots that it knows there are networks i've connected to (based on coarse location)

Wasn't sure on the antivirus applications. so far it's only really done one thing -mark a valid sms message as 'suspicious'.. Thought it might be prudent to have.

Yes, I am new to android - this is my first android phone. Previously had a blackberry.

I was hoping to not have to do a factory reset - especially given I haven't even had the phone 2 weeks. I'm trying to remember the first time I ran into the problem. I'm fairly certain it was in the first 2-3 days, when i hadn't really downloaded / installed a whole lot of apps yet. (I think that was the first time I had to do the battery pull to clear it).

The biggest annoyance is it's hard to reproduce the problem. Also, the fact that it was still doing it after a reboot, but then less than 10 minutes later it was cleared up makes it hard to determine what actually cleared up the issue.
 
Upvote 0
Okay, if you are not going to listen to the advice of others at least do us a favor and not make threads if you already have the answer. It's apparent you are not familiar with how Android operates by your post. People think they can install apps like its an iPhone and Android just doesn't function that way. There are poorly coded apps out there of which will cause problems with Android if you just download a bunch of junk apps/games to your phone. A computer will do the same thing if you load a lot of unnecessary software on your computer.
 
Upvote 0
Get My Backup, and backup all your apps, calender, bookmarks, etc...then do a restore. PITA? You bet. But even if you bring it back to VZW, they are going to tell you to do a restore. And if it works great, but even if they swap it out because there is something wrong with it, guess what? You have to restore.
 
Upvote 0
Get My Backup, and backup all your apps, calender, bookmarks, etc...then do a restore. PITA? You bet. But even if you bring it back to VZW, they are going to tell you to do a restore. And if it works great, but even if they swap it out because there is something wrong with it, guess what? You have to restore.

Does the lag only happen when you are plugged into the wall charging?
 
Upvote 0
Okay, if you are not going to listen to the advice of others at least do us a favor and not make threads if you already have the answer. It's apparent you are not familiar with how Android operates by your post. People think they can install apps like its an iPhone and Android just doesn't function that way. There are poorly coded apps out there of which will cause problems with Android if you just download a bunch of junk apps/games to your phone. A computer will do the same thing if you load a lot of unnecessary apps on your phone.

I didn't say I had the answer. I'm just trying to avoid a wipe if possible. You jump down my throat for having a task killer and I'm trying to explain that i only installed it after running into the issue to try and diagnose the problem and see what was running at the time this happens.
So are you saying that every single app or game I install will take up RAM / CPU / Battery Life in the background? I try and be at least somewhat selective in what I install. Those that i will actually use or provide some value.

I'll probably do a factory restore and just leave it at stock for a week and see if i can reproduce the problem. Was just hoping that wasn't my only option.
 
Upvote 0
Get My Backup, and backup all your apps, calender, bookmarks, etc...then do a restore. PITA? You bet. But even if you bring it back to VZW, they are going to tell you to do a restore. And if it works great, but even if they swap it out because there is something wrong with it, guess what? You have to restore.

Thanks. I'll use that to back everything up. I assumed vzw would probably do a hard reset as the first option.
 
Upvote 0
Thought I would post an update and see if I could get any additional advice.
Since my last post (7-8 days ago), the phone has been behaving pretty well.
Tonight, I noticed the problem had returned.
I used a useful tool - Multitouch Visible Test (on the market) to do a little testing - with this app, I could see that it was like it was losing track of where on the screen I was pressing / dragging. Didn't really tell me the source of the problem, but helped confirmed it wasn't just one app acting wonky, etc.

Anyway - I removed a bunch of apps, rebooted the phone - no luck. Removed the battery and waited 5 minutes.. Popped the battery back in , booted.. same problem. Waited several minutes - still an issue.

So, I bite the bullet - make sure all my stuff is backed up one more time.. and do a factory reset.

and.. as i'm typing in my google account.. IT'S STILL DOING IT... :( pressing keys on the keyboard is very slow to respond.. I'll get part of my username typed in, then it will 'pause'.. i'll hit the backspace key to remove the bad entries, and it acts like I held down the key.
So I skip syncing my account - just let me get to the home screen.
still misbehaving - swiping left or right is very troublesome.

10 minutes later.. everything seems to be behaving.. the problem just cleared itself up again with no real rhyme or reason.

The phone doesn't seem overly warm to the touch - when I ran a cpu monitor before the factory reset, nothing seemed to be taking up a large amount of cpu.
I just don't know what else to look at. If the phone is bad, why is it only doing this every couple of weeks, and what the heck is clearing the problem up?

I'll probably take it in and see if they'll swap it out for me tomorrow -now that I have it reset, might as well before I go and start reloading my critical apps, etc.

Anyone have any insight as to what else might be the source of the problem? I did have it on the wall charger when I noticed the problem, but taking it off the charger didn't seem to change it's behavior. (when it cleared up, it was back on the charger)

Thanks.
 
Upvote 0
Hmmmm...... I've had the same problem on occasion. Originally it was messing up as bad as yours and the battery was heating up and the GPS was on the fritz. I called tech support and they, eventually, told me to go back to the store and get it swapped out.

I did that and got a new one. Since then I have installed the extended battery and made a few other changes in software (installing ZD Box and changing data checking intervals, for instance) but nothing big. Now it still does that on occasion however no where near as bad or as often. So, maybe it is your phone and you should get a new one. At the same time, there's some bugs in the system and we'll have to wait for someone (HTC or modders) to come up with a solution.

Good luck and don't let the trolls get to you!
 
Upvote 0
Only problem I have had was when I downloaded the gingerbread keyboard. Then while typing on the browser. The typing would lag bad. It was doing this ten min before I am typing this. So I changedthe keyboard back to stock. This fixed my lag issues for now. I know this isn't the only problem you had. Just to give a heads up on one lagging issue with a possible fix. I would un-install those apps like task killer and watch dog and so forth.

I hope you get your bolt fixed and sounds like you need it replaced.
 
Upvote 0
I only had this problem when an app went rogue.
In my case, it's iMobsters and naturally they don't see an issue with it.

An app called process monitor gave me the clue..
I will list apps that are consuming cpu.. has a neat widget that you can use.
When it's misbehaving you can see what's doing it.

I trust you don't have iMobsters installed? :D
 
Upvote 0
How's your phone's 4G connection? Do you see it go from 4G to 3G a lot? Is your phone set to connect via Wifi every time you're near a wifi connection that you've set up? The hand-off between 4G to 3G, from wireless to wifi require the phone to use some resources to make the established connection, and the use of these resources will have an effect on other functionality. Keep your data connections simple and see what that does for phone functionality. I used to have people complain to me that their phone would act up when they'd try to launch an app only to find out that their phone was attempting to connect to a Wifi hotspot or trying to resolve a wifi connection while they were trying to launch an app.
 
Upvote 0
Nope - never heard of iMobsters. Kind of ruled out it being an application by doing the factory reset. Just so strange it would exhibit the problem for 30 minutes or so at a time, then completely clear up.
3g/4g - I don't have 4g in my area, so it's not going back and forth. I do have wireless setup at home, but it wasn't switching back and forth as far as I could tell.
Factory reset blew all those settings away as well.
 
Upvote 0
Nope - never heard of iMobsters. Kind of ruled out it being an application by doing the factory reset. Just so strange it would exhibit the problem for 30 minutes or so at a time, then completely clear up.
3g/4g - I don't have 4g in my area, so it's not going back and forth. I do have wireless setup at home, but it wasn't switching back and forth as far as I could tell.
Factory reset blew all those settings away as well.



Have you turned off 4G? If you're not in a 4G area and your phone is constantly searching for a 4G signal, that could hamper your phone's performance.
 
Upvote 0
an app called 4G LTE on off in the market.



I hate the idea of downloading an app for a function that's already available on the phone. #*#*4636*#*# on your phone will enable you to go into advanced settings on your phone. Then from there tap "Phone info" and then scroll down and change the 1st drop down box from CDMA+LTE to CDMA Auto. It also has some monitoring items like battery life/condition etc.
 
Upvote 0

BEST TECH IN 2023

We've been tracking upcoming products and ranking the best tech since 2007. Thanks for trusting our opinion: we get rewarded through affiliate links that earn us a commission and we invite you to learn more about us.

Smartphones