I've had this same problem for weeks. i just read through this thread and i started by removing the IP-widget and now the ui is atleast a little smoother, not much but abit.

I just flashed my n900 and now its running smooth. Just followed the directions on the wiki.maemo.org. all the documents were intact.

As many others here I've also experienced missed calls due to unsresponsiveness of the phone app. I've been trying to find a pattern and this is my best guess so far, just want to check with you all n see what you think:

This mostly happens when the Media player is started but not playing, and in the background. I suspect that it still has hooks out to be notified when an incoming call arrives, but being inactive it is swapped out and is retrieved from slow disk before it can respond.

BTW I lowered my swappiness setting to 20 (so far no probs). IMO if you have to swap you have already lost, I prefer to close unused apps instead.
To make swappiness stick through reboots edit /etc/init.d/rcS . An interesting read all the same, with comments like "I hate this hack". Makes me think there wasn't a real understanding of what swappiness is/does when setting it to 100, the comment reads it is too free up as much memory as possible, but again, if you have to swap you have already lost the responsiveness.

I believe there are two issues here. Maybe releated.

Somehow blocking IO and just not enough RAM.

OK, IO blocking:

Is someone else have the same problem?

Try this: Get a fast internet connection (some WLAN) and download something bigger. I am downloading with about 1,3 Megabyte/s (speed of my Internet connection) and for the time of the download everything gets verly sluggish.

Don't really understand why. Seems like disk io (at least to the big 32 GB flash) blocks everything else.

Anyone an idea why? Bad kernel settings, bad disk driver? Or even a hardware limitation?

I believe this is the reason for most slowdowns and unresponsivness.

OK. Now I need your help guys.

I have kept my N900 on for 7 days and now i´m starting to see unresponsiveness when phone rings:
- keyboard open and in idle
- screen light on (2s)
- goes black (1s)
- phone starts to ring and shows phone application on landscape mode (because keyboard open)
- I close keyboard (should rotate to portrait mode)
- Goes black and just rings
- After many switch lock pushings it shows phone app again in portrait
- 3-5 taps to screen before screen notices and phone answers


I´m not sure if this whole thing has problems with rotation+phone doing something else at same time.

Some settings, but before these i had this problem already when uptime was more than 2 days
- Swappiness is 30
- Only extras and Nokias repositories enabled
- Only calendar widget on desktop
- Battery eye demon on background
- Smartreflex on

I haven't reseted hildon-desktop yet, but I really want to find now where the this (memory?) problem lies.

I haven't noticed high cpu activity just slowed down phone application when it rings. I also think that notifications are right now slower than right after reboot.

This is really really hard to notice at first because over time you adapt to phone's speed so you do not first notice that it's slowing down. Only in some places you just think that why this feels so slow and right after reboot you realize that **** everything works as it should.

I have installed fremantle-tools spmaps-memory-private and some tracking tools. Just tell me what to look for and i will send my memory statistics here so we can compare them.

.edit
Hmm. Should have probably posted here:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=42500
But I´m not sure if this is hildon-home problem.

Personally i tihnk that if you do not install any test apps/widgets then the n900 runs better and fine.
Right now i have got a few apps and some widgets installed. my rootfs space is sitting at around 27mb available.
I sometimes get wierd behaviour such as lag, hildon not responding message error, reboot, an widgets disapearing.
A restart or switching the device off for a few mins seems to fix the problems.

This is more of a mini laptop so i can live with these things but sometimes it can be a nuisance if your out and it does this when you are showing it to folk :-P

True but i have just one widget installed and one background daemon. :|

I have 47 mb free rootfs

Reboot for me is just failure. YOU should not have to reboot this thing. Period. Probably complete flash could fix this but I will not do that It´s too easy and after that i' am as dumb as now.

Hmm. I do not have to reboot my machines. My linux or windows machines do not get slower over time. I have had same installation for at least 3-5 years. Even if i keep them running for months.

Excuse me but on some level I hate this reboot fixes your problems mentality and i think that people take it nowdays as granted. I really would like to help, but reboot is just workaround to fix.

"probably complete flash could fix this."

Yes.

mine is performing MUCH better after last update. But keeping it alive w/o reboot more than 3 days starts introducing glitches and slows it down a little.

Yeah...Remember that quite probably i´m not the only one who is having these issues. Look this thread and thread what I linked and read also bug report.

I´m just really trying to get help and help others :|

It might be some testing/development app, but i need to spot it. AND i do not know how. I´m just trying to get help.