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Tweaking Android for Speed

UnknownUnknown
edited May 2011 in Tech & Games
Does anyone else here obsess over their phone being speedy, tidy and junk free? I've rooted and I haven't gotten around to installing a Vanilla ROM yet, and I've instead stuck with Froyo. However, I've installed a few applications which I find myself using quite a lot.

Autokiller Memory Optimizer - https://market.android.com/details?id=com.rs.autokiller

This application handles the way which your Android device handles memory and processes on your phone. It also greatly increases battery life when you've got the perfect configuration set up! I can get a whole day of extra battery life with this app :)

History Eraser - https://market.android.com/details?id=mobi.infolife.eraser&feature=search_result

This is an app which is capable of cleaning a lot of shit from your phone through the use of a basic GUI. You tick the boxes which you want removing, and the application will run and remove things like the App Cache, draft messages, internet history, etc etc. Check it out!

Aside from these applications, I also trim the fat off by uninstalling things which I don't need, moving applications to the SD card to free up phone space, and organizing my home screens for efficient navigation.

Do you do anything like this to your phones? :D
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Comments

  • RemadERemadE Global Moderator
    edited May 2011
    Mine has an 8GB memory cary (Crapberry 8900) and so I keep a "home dump" folder there with useful shit I get from my house and transfer over like a USB stick. Aside from that, just kept orderly and spacious ;)
    I'd like an Android phone as they seem to have a good range of Application. Fuck the iPhone. I bet half the people with one don't even know what "App" is short for. I know 2 of them :facepalm:
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  • BoxBox Regular
    edited May 2011
    Woah, an app that reduces battery life up to a whole DAY! DAYUM!
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  • UnknownUnknown
    edited May 2011
    Box wrote: »
    Woah, an app that reduces battery life up to a whole DAY! DAYUM!

    Haha, thanks for pointing that out. Updated the post with the correct word.
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  • MayberryMayberry Regular
    edited May 2011
    I haven't rooted my phone, but I pretty much just install what I need and make sure to kill any programs that I don't need running. But Gingerbread itself is quite speedy. Would be even speedier if I used a static wallpaper, but live wallpapers are too awesome to put down.
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  • UnknownUnknown
    edited May 2011
    Apparently it's not good practice to use task killers on your device. Android smartphones are naturally built to be multitasking machines, and it messes up the optimization of the memory or something when you kill tasks. I can't remember exactly, but have a look on Google for why they're a bad idea, if you're interested.
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  • BoxBox Regular
    edited May 2011
    Is rooting the equivalent to jailbreaking?

    Well like android, jailbreaking iOS enables a shitton of stuff. Apps that automatically turn off 3G and other stuff when not in use, faster page loading, etc.
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  • BaconPieBaconPie Regular
    edited May 2011
    I have an iPhone but I still do these things. I have all the apps I use most often on the first page so that I can get to it without any fussing about. Also, I've doubled the speed of the UI elements so everything is more snappy. Disabled 'Spotlight Search' so that the phone doesn't do any indexing in the background. Auto brightness so when it's dark, the screen auto-dims.

    Stuff like that.
    trx100 wrote: »
    Apparently it's not good practice to use task killers on your device.

    All smartphones do this. Your memory has to be powered anyway so, ideally, it should be full all the time to minimize expensive disk (flash) drive access.

    In fact, all operating systems do this, when you load a program it stays in memory even when you close it so that the next time you call it, you don't have to trawl through the big old disk drive. It saving power and it's faster over all. You can even try it, try loading python or octave and see how long it takes to load. Then try loading it a second time. Subsequent opens happen instantly!

    If the phone needs to free up some memory then it will do it itself, that's the whole point of an operating system, so you don't have too.
    Box wrote: »
    Is rooting the equivalent to jailbreaking?

    Yeah, both get you root user access so you can run unsigned code (iPhone, I think you can run unsigned code already on Android) or perform privileged operations (iPhone and Android).
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  • UnknownUnknown
    edited May 2011
    This is something taken from the developer's website which explains how Android manages it's memory...
    ActivityManagerService.java tracks the "importance" of processes (is foreground, is running a service, ..) and reflects this importance by setting the "oom_adj" value of the process.
    (For info: "oom_adj" is a value of every process under Linux which gives the kernel a hint, which process it can kill in an oom [out of memory] situation. You can see this value on every Linux 2.6 system in the proc directory: /proc/[PID]/oom_adj ). The higher this value is set, the more likely this process gets selected by the kernel's oom killer.)
    It seems that on Android the current forefround application gets an oom_adj value of 0 and as soon it's not visible anymore it gets some higher value. I assume the concrete value is dependent by the processes' place in the LRU list.

    The out-of-memory killer in the standard Linux kernel only runs in one situation: when the available memory is critical low. However in the Android Linux kernel there is implemented a more fine-grained handling of low memory situations.
    I found the kernel source file "lowmemorykiller.c" (located in the kernel source tree under "drivers/misc/"; or look here for GIT source tree: tinyurl.com/lowmemkiller).

    This module seems to be more configurable than the kernel's standard out-of-memory killer as you can define more than one memory limit, when it should get active and you can tell it which oom_adj values it may kill.
    In other words: You can say "if free memory goes below XXXX then kill some process with oom_adj greater then YYY; if free memory goes even more below than ZZZ then start to kill some processes with oom_adj greater than XYXY. and so on.."
    So it's possible to define multiple memory criterias and matching processes which can be killed in these situations.


    It's interesting, that's for sure. Then it goes on to mention how the memory is split up into 6 different categories, etc. If you want to read the whole article then click here...

    http://andrs.w3pla.net/autokiller/details
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