Develop Bugs

[TIP] Enable swap

After using A2SD to format a swap partition it is not active.
So to enable it, do the following:
Install ROM Manager trough market.
Start ROM Manager and select the first option "Flash ClockworkMod Recovery".
Turn off your device.
Turn on device with volume down pressed.
Press volume down, selection will switch to RECOVERY then press power button.
At the black screen with red triangle press volume up and power button.
Press volume down, selection will switch to Apply sdcard:update.zip and then press power button.
Open a console, navigate to the android SDK tools folder.
Type "adb mount /system", without the quotes doh!
Type "adb shell".
At the shell copy paste the following commands one by one and press enter after pasting them.
echo "#!/system/bin/sh" > /system/etc/init.d/05userinit
echo "swapon -a" >> /system/etc/init.d/05userinit
echo "/dev/block/mmcblk0p3 swap swap" >> /system/etc/fstab
chmod +x /system/etc/init.d/05userinit
chmod g-w /system/etc/init.d/05userinit
chmod o-w /system/etc/init.d/05userinit
chmod g-w /system/etc/fstab
chmod o-w /system/etc/fstab
exit
Now you are back at the normal command prompt, type "adb reboot".
Device will reboot, when its done open a terminal and type "free".
It should show swap space allocated.
And with some programs in memory you can see swap being used:
adb shell
free
total used free shared buffers
Mem: 407860 399940 7920 0 872
Swap: 249596 16596 233000
Total: 657456 416536 240920
Altho it was just using a small bit of swap, this obviously helps.
I was running two benchmarks, had maps open and a radio stream playing.
Quadrant showed my Desire rating at 559 while I was trying to get the phone to actually USE the swap space ...
Btw this is my first Android phone, but I have a rich linux background since 1998. Let's try Android 2.2 as this would boost the benchmark quite notably I recon!

For the most part, swap is not a good idea on Android, because is prevents Androids internal process management from operating efficiently. In some cases, swap can increase performance but in general use it doesn't.
Regards,
DAve

I have to disagree that enabling swap prevents memory management from being effective.
Altho enabling swap "might" degrade the lifetime of your SD card, it still holds memory which is not in use for some time.
You can confirm this by booting up the phone with swap enabled, check the free command and you will notice swap space not being used at all for a fairly long time and even using some applications.
After roughly a day usage, battery is still not empty (Im amazed by this HTC phone!) and swap space is being used by quite abit! Its using over 120mb right now and I still have roughly 10mb free normal memory. Programs still load near instantly and thus tells me swap management works like it should.
To perform a sanity check I started Maps again, free memory dropped to 3mb and some swap was freed. Which confirms that I had not used Maps for the whole day (was sleeping in bed lol) and when it started requested memory which was swapped away and obviously released when it was needed again.
Benchmarks tell me the same story, phone is scoring higher numbers than I tested earlier but this is due to me trying to fill swap during the benchmarks earlier this day. 571 compared to 559, it's not alot but it is "some".
To make a long story short, swap increased performance only when memory is being used too much. Will the performance be noticeable? Probably marginal, but you might notice the difference when your phone has been on for a few days straight. Because the longer you use it, more memory will be used and more unused parts of memory will be swapped.
You might also notice the swap increase when using lots of apps at the same time, mostly using multiple webpages and Maps at the same time.
Some arguments about SD cards being slow, this is only true for writes and not reads.

After further investigation and testing ...
The memory manager from Android could even be optimised for swap.
The current state makes absolutely no use of available swap space, except when memory get filled and then it will start swapping.
In fact it makes TERRIBLE use of swap space ...
You can test this yourself pretty easily yourself. Just open as many applications as you can to fill swap space and leave the phone running for a few hours. If you are like me you are playing with it, testing and/or whatnot you like todo.
After a few hours your swap space will be well filled, in my case around 120mb.
Now I run Advanced Task Killer to kill everything that was running, now swap space used dropped to around 30-40mb and I have almost 100mb free memory ... (free 96924).
Now I reboot the phone and check again after killing all tasks, result is .... rebooting to make an acurate post ... 61528.
So that is roughly 35mb of swapped memory which WAS inuse by Android, HTC Sence and whatnot that was not needed. Ofcourse if the memory would be needed again, it would simple be put back into memory and as this happens alot with lots of applications running.
I can safely conclude that memory management on the Android can be improved by the use of swap ... if it were actually used properly. The only way now is to use a task killer and see your memory increase over time, which is great as my Desire shows absolutely now slow downs or choppyness at all.
On the other hand, testing without swap enabled showed that the memory would increase after bootup too. But not close to 100mb, more like 70mb.
Another point to defeat the point against using swap, the swapped memory is placed on SD and SD write speeds are usualy slow. The slow write speed however does not matter if the memory is not filled already and the to be swapped memory was not inuse for a given time. The other way round when the memory is indeed needed again, SD reads are usualy much faster than writing and as it is such a small amount the read is faster than one would notice.
So when I get time for it, I'll dive into the kernel source. See if we can get a better memory/swap manager going for our already snappy fast phones and make them even faster!

double post :s

sfjuocekr said:
I have to disagree that enabling swap prevents memory management from being effective.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you use swap, you are effectively telling Android you have more memory than you actually have. Therefore, it doesn't reach a memory low condition until you've used up swap, which means it doesn't start killing processes.
Use of swap practically mandates the use of a task killer to kill processes that
Android task management would have usually killed to keep the phone operating smoothly.
Regards,
Dave

You aren't telling Android that you have more memory, there is memory and there is swap.
If Android's process manager doesn't kill processes because it thinks you have more memory, it's clearly stupid as it doesn't know the difference between swap and memory. Besides that both memory and swap are reported independenty.
After 17 hours uptime my phone still holds around 35mb in swap and around 40-50mb free memory, so Androids process/memory manager can clearly be improved to facilitate swap space.

Hi sfjuocekr,
first of all thanks for your little tutorial.
I just wanted to know, that method is still working? I mean on CM7 etc.
And will stay after updating the ROM (e.g. nightlies) or has to be done again every time?
Then, in your case the swap partition was mmcblk0p3, but it's not always like that and should be checked right?

[Q] CM6 camera app...Maximum 30 minutes recording?

Anyone encounter a FC when recording for long periods of time?
I have a clean 16gb Class 10 card in it, so space and transfer shouldn't have been an issue.
Did some quick searching on this forum, didn't find anything relevant. Feel free to school me with proper search terms if it's been asked/commented elsewhere.
Edit:
It's 30 minutes not seconds (title updated).

I guess I was caught off guard at the fact that it FC'd at 30 minutes; there are settings that I didn't see before that limit you to a maximum of 30 minutes. Really wish it would go longer though.

Wow, you actually recorded for 30 constant minutes!? I'm not sure why you need to record that long with an evo. If you are recording a play or dance recital you should be using a real camera with a tripod.
A lot of still camera video will cap out at an hour or 4GB whatever comes first. Usually the 4GB comes first. The FAT32 file system is limited to 4GB files.

Only hitting 1.4 gig at 30 minutes.
Was recording a work meeting for my boss whom couldn't attend.

[Q] Clearing RAM

Whenever i clear the ram on the phone, it seems to move all the applications on my home screen around, making me put them into their places all over again. Anybody know why this is happening?

bump
bump

Well this is awkward a bit
Try to use the stock ram cleaner & tbh i never encounter that issue atall
Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 2

that;s the one im using, the stock ram cleaner, when you hold down the home button, bottom left and click on RAM then clear memory. That's when it happens :S

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCh7z5EwYF8

Know the Difference Between Good and Bad High RAM Usage
"Sometimes people like to panic when their computer's resources seem to be maxed out. While CPUs and hard disks may suffer from high usage, RAM doesn't necessarily slow down your computer when it appears to be running low."
http://lifehacker.com/5958598/know-the-difference-between-good-and-bad-high-ram-usage
Whether your RAM is full of cached files or completely empty, it's all available for programs that really need it. Cached data in your RAM is marked as low-priority, and it's instantly discarded as soon as the memory is needed for something else. Because this data can be instantly discarded when necessary, there's no disadvantage to using the RAM for cache. (The one potential disadvantage is users who don't understand what's going on becoming confused.)
Empty RAM is useless. It's not any faster for the computer to write data to empty RAM, nor does empty RAM use less power. In fact, assuming you're launching a program that may already be present in your RAM's file cache, programs will load much faster when your RAM is used rather than when it's empty.

LLanito said:
Whenever i clear the ram on the phone, it seems to move all the applications on my home screen around, making me put them into their places all over again. Anybody know why this is happening?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You mean to say it refreshes the whol3 screen after you clear ram?
sent from: The New S-Pen

tbh, when i cleared the ram, it would remove dolphin browser and the stock msg app into the all app folders for some reason. si id have to put them back to their place every time.

MohJee said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCh7z5EwYF8
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
hahahahah wtf

How to test what's using disk i/o

I'm getting poor performance, something is hammering the sdcard. But which sdcard? My test phone has 3, 2 internal and 1 removable. The tool 'top' (from Elixir 2) shows iowait is very high. But how can I figure out which app is doing it?

Bugs that need to be fixed in android lollipop..

I'm facing few issues I hope they got fixed in next major update...
1. Charging taking long time around 2:30 hours for full charge and discharge in 4:30 hours only
2. High brightness on low value that takes most of battery I.e screen
3. Camera charity is low photos have more shadow or less shadow than original
4. Gallery I.e photos is linked with Google plus app need separate application
5. Some apps are blurry like play store it also don't show download %
6. Mobile always on 37c while charging/gaming it goes to 39c on benchmark it goes further upto 41c
7. Mono speaker sound instead stereo sound
8. MTP mode not working for me ?? also fix SD card issues no way to change permissions and create folders using file managers
9. Problems with different headphones with mic
10. Mobile data drops because of bad 2g/3g hand off is not good..
Here is my list post yours

deccen90 said:
I'm facing few issues I hope they got fixed in next major update...
1. Charging taking long time around 2:30 hours for full charge and discharge in 4:30 hours only
2. High brightness on low value that takes most of battery I.e screen
3. Camera charity is low photos have more shadow or less shadow than original
4. Gallery I.e photos is linked with Google plus app need separate application
5. Some apps are blurry like play store it also don't show download %
6. Mobile always on 37c while charging/gaming it goes to 39c on benchmark it goes further upto 41c
7. Mono speaker sound instead stereo sound
8. MTP mode not working for me ?? also fix SD card issues no way to change permissions and create folders using file managers
9. Problems with different headphones with mic
10. Mobile data drops because of bad 2g/3g hand off is not good..
Here is my list post yours
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am also facing the problem that in the notification panel the downloading apps % is not shown.
Which is not good.
Sent from my Micromax AQ4501 using XDA Free mobile app

LOL LLOLOLOLOL Must read
deccen90 said:
I'm facing few issues I hope they got fixed in next major update...
1. Charging taking long time around 2:30 hours for full charge and discharge in 4:30 hours only
2. High brightness on low value that takes most of battery I.e screen
3. Camera charity is low photos have more shadow or less shadow than original
4. Gallery I.e photos is linked with Google plus app need separate application
5. Some apps are blurry like play store it also don't show download %
6. Mobile always on 37c while charging/gaming it goes to 39c on benchmark it goes further upto 41c
7. Mono speaker sound instead stereo sound
8. MTP mode not working for me ?? also fix SD card issues no way to change permissions and create folders using file managers
9. Problems with different headphones with mic
10. Mobile data drops because of bad 2g/3g hand off is not good..
Here is my list post yours
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think you need to pay around 200 $ to buy such phone... cant expect anything on this bugget .... Try to compromise or pay more...

I'm facing a display/font bug. In Reddit Is Fun and Zerodha mobile app, some items in the menu are not visible. They are moved sideways. This bug is occuring if the font is set to normal.
But if I make the font size as small, then no issues but it makes whole device uncomfortable to read.
Sent from my Micromax AQ4501 using XDA Free mobile app

I guess its application problem ... Ur bug should be patched ... BTW I got updates of all applications . means from play store ... Each and every app that I installed got a update
Sent from my Micromax AQ4501 using XDA Free mobile app

Yup there are bugs and they are noticeable.
I highly agree with the tenth point... Yup, there is serious problem with the network, constantly drops the Internet and the range is also poor. I had an HTC dual sim phone and it never had any issues of range with the same sim, same room, same location. Always enjoyed full range with that phone with the same sim card. I am sure this phone has at least a software issue if not actually cheap hardware antenna. ?
And as far as the app download percentage is concerned, it's also been poorly handled.. Try downloading an app smaller than 1mb, something like network speed, or flashlight widget.. Bammm ??? there we have the download percentage... Hence, bigger apps haven't been properly handled while making the ROM.
There are other issues but it's OK.. What can you expect at this price anyways... The camera is poor. And the front camera is super bad.. Very narrow lens and poorest low light performance. But that's still bearable coz of the price.
The phone is not all about bugs though. If I have criticised it then I must take equal opportunity to praise the phone.. It has amazing voice quality, that is while talking over phone. Secondly, the performance is par excellence for me. Wow, butter smooth. No lags, no jitters, no hangs whatsoever. Not even once. I wonder how did they do it.. My friends have such expensive Sony, HTC, Samsung and mmx phones and they are so laggy at times.. Lol... I am so so so happy over this phone.
Just the both cameras, the network dropping, lowest brightness setting, are the points which, if improved this device will be killing the competition... Why go for Samsung s5 man??? This just does the same job just as well. ?