Develop Bugs

Android on RAM?

Hi just out of interest would it be possible to let android run from RAM on the desire as a dev made it possible on the HD2? I mean that would really improve performance as RAM is quite a bit faster than NAND and SD and on the HD2 it seems to work well and not even run out of ram (which is quite awesome IMO).

quad2012 said:
Hi just out of interest would it be possible to let android run from RAM on the desire as a dev made it possible on the HD2? I mean that would really improve performance as RAM is quite a bit faster than NAND and SD and on the HD2 it seems to work well and not even run out of ram (which is quite awesome IMO).
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its only the fs that gets stored on the ram before boot not data, so I/O improvements would be minimal as the device rarely need to R/W from system compared to /data, also HD roms need to run totally from sd card witch is slower than nand obviously, so you gotta ask yourself would you be prepared to loose 150-250mb of ram, just from a minor speed improvement?

Ahh ok makes sense only one noob question xD on HD2 lot's of people experienced quite a performance boost is that because of the different devices?

quad2012 said:
Ahh ok makes sense only one noob question xD on HD2 lot's of people experienced quite a performance boost is that because of the different devices?
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its prob because the whole rom is booted from the sd card, if you notice, when Multiple process try to access a sd card, each process after the first one gets lower and lower R/W speed, try it with a sd card reader on your pc, if you try to copy 10 seperate files to your sd card at once, the first one coppies at normal speed but the others will be gradually slower and slower, the same thing happens when Multiple android processes would try to access the sd card, leading to obvious lag, a nand chip, and ram dosent have this problem all processes have the same R/W speed.

[Q] Dalvik Cache

By moving the dalvik cache to the sd-ext, does it slow the rom down?

Some people will say yes, some people will say no...
From personal use I'll say I've moved my dalvik cache to my sd card on a couple of rom's and never noticed a difference. I wouldn't recommend it with a class 2 sd card, but with class 4 and above it should be fine.

I never felt any difference and I have been practicing this long before alternate hboot's came into play.
Also card's wear is reduced and supposedly battery life a bit better by a marginal value equal to those of havs/svs, hardkeys backlight on/off etc.
zedmarcus said:
I wouldn't recommend it with a class 2 sd card, but with class 4 and above it should be fine.
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Again:
Class = minimal sequential write speed -> large files.
Random writes -> dalvik cache.
Hence, cards class only guarantees card will perform at it's rated speed with sequential writes. Unfortunately increase in sequential speed doesn't mean linear increase in random. Or put bluntly, this justifies why some people could run data2sd scripts with lower end cards better than the others who had better cards.

erklat said:
I never felt any difference and I have been practicing this long before alternate hboot's came into play.
Also card's wear is reduced and supposedly battery life a bit better by a marginal value equal to those of havs/svs, hardkeys backlight on/off etc.
Again:
Class = minimal sequential write speed -> large files.
Random writes -> dalvik cache.
Hence, cards class only guarantees card will perform at it's rated speed with sequential writes. Unfortunately increase in sequential speed doesn't mean linear increase in random. Or put bluntly, this justifies why some people could run data2sd scripts with lower end cards better than the others who had better cards.
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Saw you having a similar conversation with island3r in the insertcoin thread
AGAIN: "http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...i,2940-11.html
Scroll down to sequential write. As the class goes up (in direct relation to the card's brand quality) sequential write speeds go up as well.
Of course, for instance, a Kingston class 6 is going to be faster than a Adata class 10.
But as a general rule (especially between the same brand), the higher the class, the higher the speed."

This time I am better prepared, second. Couldn't find it last night for the love of God otherwise that argument would be over quickly.
EDIT:
sibere said:
Card class indicates minimum sequential write speed achievable on the card.
It's good for writing big files like movie files.
But when it comes to writing small random files, it can be the opposite. Many people reported having bad random write speeds with C10 cards whereas others reported better speeds with lower class cards.
It's a matter of sd controler quality and size of erase block size. Bigger and faster SD cards have bigger erase block sizes (up to 256Ko). It means that those cards need to write 256Ko of data even for writing a single byte on the card.
That's why C10 are not the best choice when it comes to DATA2SD or any kind of similar solution to short data storage on the Desire.
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Now, I don't suppose that creator of data2sd scripts knows anything better than island3r or Tom's hardware, but that's just the way it is. Your choice whom are you going to take for serious.
I suppose you are going to start rant about 720p recording in dalvik thread like he did?

Thanks for the replies. But I think i will leave it where it is on the internal memory because my SD-ext is only 512mb and I am running out of space

erklat said:
This time I am better prepared, second. Couldn't find it last night for the love of God otherwise that argument would be over quickly.
Now, I don't suppose that creator of data2sd scripts knows anything better than island3r or Tom's hardware, but that's just the way it is. Your choice whom are you going to take for serious.
I suppose you are going to start rant about 720p recording in dalvik thread like he did?
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Click to collapse
Nah... I was just messing with you
I'm a noob really and don't understand much of this "data2sd scripts" and all that malarky. From my personal experience I was using a class 4 8gb with the dalvik on the card and found no issues with it. No lag's or pauses or anything. I've since moved to a class 10 16gb and decided to keep my dalvik on the nand because I don't need the extra space for 100's of apps like some people do - my needs for apps are simple
IF I did have a class 2 I'd be a bit worried about putting the dalvik onto it, but like you said, it depends on the random read/write speeds the card can handle.
ps: you should have had that answer the other day with island3r

zedmarcus said:
ps: you should have had that answer the other day with island3r
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Click to collapse
As I said I couldn't find it last night. I have no doubt he will see it here too. This puts a nice finishing touch to who was right and who was wrong so I have no need to reignite that discussion again

[Q] swap partition on eeprom

Can I use a part of the 1.5gb of rom in the desire z/ G2 to make a swap partition?!
It's dangerous to the eeprom life?
Performance would be much better than microSD I think..

nagash91 said:
Can I use a part of the 1.5gb of rom in the desire z/ G2 to make a swap partition?!
It's dangerous to the eeprom life?
Performance would be much better than microSD I think..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As far as I know such a thing does not exist, though like you suggested it may be dangerous due to data corruption (though if properly partitioned you can fix it)
On the other hand using microSD for swap has been nothing but good for me, it has significantly improved speed, cause it is only a couple hundred Mbs of data on the swap partition so it can transfer quickly and smoothly, also it's only used when absolutely necessary.
What class microSD do you have?

noneabove said:
As far as I know such a thing does not exist, though like you suggested it may be dangerous due to data corruption (though if properly partitioned you can fix it)
On the other hand using microSD for swap has been nothing but good for me, it has significantly improved speed, cause it is only a couple hundred Mbs of data on the swap partition so it can transfer quickly and smoothly, also it's only used when absolutely necessary.
What class microSD do you have?
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I have class 6 microSD, but I think it's fake (trasfering speed is 2 - 3 mbps).
I think that the most important propriety for a good swap is the access time.. but the problem is that I can't find a site where I can see the access time of microSD tested by someone.
I want to buy a 32gb microSD class 10 or class 6, but if I can't find the access time..
I find that mustang and samsung microSD class 10 are cheap..
BTW I would love to know if I can make the swap file in /data or in /temp.
Access time in ROM is a lot faster that in microSD.
I don't think that rom can be damaged by a lot of writing, so why I can't use that support for swap. It would not faster as RAM, but absolutely faster than microSD class 10.
PS: I tried to make swap file on microSD with swapper2 and cyanomod 7.1. I get an error on swapon.. does cyanomod kernel support swap!? Thanks

nagash91 said:
I have class 6 microSD, but I think it's fake (trasfering speed is 2 - 3 mbps).
I think that the most important propriety for a good swap is the access time.. but the problem is that I can't find a site where I can see the access time of microSD tested by someone.
I want to buy a 32gb microSD class 10 or class 6, but if I can't find the access time..
I find that mustang and samsung microSD class 10 are cheap..
BTW I would love to know if I can make the swap file in /data or in /temp.
Access time in ROM is a lot faster that in microSD.
I don't think that rom can be damaged by a lot of writing, so why I can't use that support for swap. It would not faster as RAM, but absolutely faster than microSD class 10.
PS: I tried to make swap file on microSD with swapper2 and cyanomod 7.1. I get an error on swapon.. does cyanomod kernel support swap!? Thanks
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It should but for the life of me I have no idea why, I'm assuming you were just testing it out but if not, swap is NOT needed for most AOSP ROMs and could in fact slow down your phone and kill your battery.
Also swapper is not the most recommended way of doing it as if something gets corrupted there goes your whole SD Card.. :/ safer to make a partition on it.
As for speeds, the speed from the phone to the SD Card compared to the SD Card to the computer (through the phone/data cable) will vary significantly, and so will read/write times. For me through my phone I can read at around 15 Mb/s (class 10) and write at 3 Mb/s, but if I take it out and put it in a Micro SD Card converter then I can write at speeds of at least 10 Mb/s.
As for access time.. If I'm not mistaken, after RAM, SD storage is one of the fastest digital reading and writing in terms of access time. I have noticed no discrepancies in speed where it would have to read or write to my SD Card's swap so I think that'll be okay.
As for finding out if the ROM can be used... Quite frankly, not a clue, but I would tread lightly there if you want to start experimenting

i am thinking about the same question... Maybe it 's to be safe to use your sd card and make a swap partition. However i am on miui which doesn't require a swap so i don't have to use a swap partition. And the sense 3.5 and 3.0 are to slow and to heavy for me for the old desire z with a such amount of ram memory ..

Worth upgrading from c6 to c10 sd card

Hi,
i have the problem of not enough memory OR a slow system. Currently im using a class6 16gb microsd with default app2sd from the rom (JB spazedog), but the app data fills up the internal memory nonetheless. If i move everything (not just apps) to the sd the system is getting slow and unresponsive.
It is worth getting a faster sd (class 10) and moving everything to sd or do i have no choice but keeping apps to a minimum?
Thx

drdoomgod said:
It is worth getting a faster sd (class 10)?
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Click to collapse
No, but it would probably be worth to change to some rom which is not in beta and fits in /system small enough to have /data big enough to keep dalvik on nand and give more space for apps.

When using 6class and 10class i feel no significant changes in speed of app2sd area.
running speed test, write speed is usually about the same, read gives little higher results.
attachment below 16gb Transcend 10class vs Adata 8 gb 6class

I'm using ICS Spazedog and DiskManager is working fine. Sometimes I have to switch pages when looking at app storage to get it to work. Maybe it didn't install properly, maybe your partitions need to be aligned, maybe the SD card needs to be reformatted. Could be quite a few things doing it.

Nope

Class 6 -> 10
If you use App2SD, definitely no.
If you use Data2SD, it is possible to see some differences.

oxyg3n89 said:
When using 6class and 10class i feel no significant changes in speed of app2sd area.
running speed test, write speed is usually about the same, read gives little higher results.
attachment below 16gb Transcend 10class vs Adata 8 gb 6class
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In terms of memory, you have to keep in mind that using a2sd means sending the dalvik (if you choose so) ans the app to the sd-ext. While it allows to more internal space, it still decreases.
The sd-ext partition is practically limited to 1024mb by the desire inter storage size too, meaning that going over 1gb of sd-ext size wouldn't be better.
Now like erklat said, it is better to switch to more stable ROM as JB ROMs offer few space and their behavior have not yet been standardized.
Recap: In terms of memory, it is not necessary to change to an upper class, but it is always a nice harmless improvement.
In terms of speed, I have seen that changing to class 10 gives great speed changes in terms of massive gaming:
Due to the higher read speed and also with the read ahead bumped I was able to increase greatly the loading time of such games as Modern Combat 3 and Nova 3. I was surprised since I thought that it was because of the processor mainly that it was so slow. There is an increase in performance when switching to an upper class, but frankly you cannot notice it unless you benchmark the results by testing with a ressource eater app.
To recap: It is worth the change only for the read speed. I'm not sure but I think that write speed is somewhat limited somehow by the hardware. (I'm thinking about windows here, if someone could confirm that please. )
________________________________
Please press thanks if I helped you in any way.
Sent from my HTC Desire using the xda app.

..

I am using class 10 transcend 8gb for spazedog JB rom and class 6 transcend 8gb for cm7 rom. No issues.
Sent from my HTC Desire using xda app-developers app

[Q] Safety of RAM Expander kind apps

Hello,
I'm using an app called RAM EXpander to increase swap in order to unlag my phone wich is running many many apps...
Since our Xperia S doesnt have much ram, this was the only solution to keep everything running and to not make lag in my phone..
So the question is, how safe can be the use of this kind of apps in relation of the flash memory usage (readings/writings)..
AFAIK it'll do some harm in the long term, but what long term means?? 2 years? 1 month and it'll kill my phone flash memory?? 10 years??
I've seen in XDA and all over the web, people that comment on how bad is using flash as a swap because of the writing limitations in flash memory, but still havent seen an actual case of a dead flash memory... LOL
thank you in advance

As far as I know the only "downside" of using Swap is that it degrades the SDcard, shortening it's life, but it's only noticeable after long periods of usage ( 5/6 years ? ) because of the constant write when swapping inactive blocks from the RAM to the swap partition. Neither you or I have seen dead SDcards because almost no one keeps the same phone for so many years, considering that those who use SWAP tends to need more performance from the phone and, consequently, ends up upgrading the phone itself in about 2/3 years maximum.
Even tho, I don't see swap as a good alternative for "better" multitasking.. sdcard has much slower write/read speeds comparing to RAM (even SSDs are much slower), so re-opening purged apps can be way faster than just swapping it back to the RAM. But it's my opinion