Please do not construe this thread as an angry rant because I am trying to be constructive (though there's a fair amount to be angry about).

There are many issues with the N900:

1 - Speed/usability
2 - Quality of core apps
3 - Lack of extra apps

While point (3) is where the open source community (and I myself) can help points (1) and (2) are out of our control and are, in my opinion, serious and hidden issues on this phone.

This post is just about (1) -- speed and usability -- though point (2) deserves a whole discussion on its own. All the reviews of the N900 seem to describe it as blazing fast but that is really not the way i would. On the contrary, after a few days of moderate use I find it really slows down a lot and I have to constantly make sure to kill off any unused applications.

Even after so doing trying to do something basic like listening to music while browsing is impractically slow. Launching the task-manager takes a long time and windows in it are unresponsive. I sometimes can't respond to phone calls because the phone application takes too long (over 5 seconds) to launch/show up. For something that's supposed to be a phone that's a pretty serious flaw.

Are other users having the same problems? I've seen a lot of users complaining about these things on this forum but other users defending the N900. But the problems I'm having are not due to any messing around (I don't even have extra-dev repos enabled) or special usage -- they appear after just opening a few browser windows and the music player. I may have a bad habit of leaving stuff open but we're not talking more than 6 windows in the task manager. And even after closing things the phone stays very unresponsive.

So my questions are: is everyone having this problem or do some people really always find the N900 responsive? If so why does this effect only some people? On the other hand, if this is a standard problem what can be done about it? This should be the focus of upcoming firmware upgrades as such issues render the phone quite dysfunctional.

Search bugzilla and forum.

People saying that there is no problem are people who turn off every theme and bling to bare minimum and care only about raw processing power when running script from CLI.

I do not care transition but scrolling is not on level what is should be. For example play some song and go browsing your album art. It looks horrible :| Nokias developers know this. You can read from bugzilla conversations about this and its just on level what they found acceptable. So called "arguments" might be that "it has 2.5 times pixels than iphone so do not expect"?

Also probably people* who have never ever seen products with high FPS on UI will likely not even understand what you are talking about.

*
Owned only Nokias products.

.edit
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8017
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5455
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7411

..edit
When comparing scrolling good reference is microb. Scrolling should be across platform smooth as in microb. I do understand that if you are running other applications on background it could get jerky, but even without any applications running background it´s bit jerky.

I am most certainly not having this problem, my N900 (pr1.1) is fast and responsive.

I know the issue with scrolling and was even able to come up with that (lame) excuse myself though this feels lot more like a software than a hardware limitation (the iphone just seems to be more clever at showing the user some uprezed cached image while its generating content).

What I'm talking about though is more serious than less-than-snappy scrolling. I'm talking about grinding to a halt when switching applications or music player stuttering terribly while trying to start up the web browser or missing a call cause the phone app can't load fast enough. It all smacks of swapping stuff in and out of memory. I think the N900 apps are too memory hungry and very poorly optimized, especially the music player.

For me this often makes the phone unusable so I have to kill off all apps I'm using and I've even taken to rebooting. Are other people having the same problem?

No developer should find this acceptable.

Okey. This is not normal. So could you list here all your extra applications and also run in terminal
df -h|grep rootfs
and tell how much you have free space left

Additionally I would install cpumem applet which show cpu load at status bar. If it starts to hit red and you are not doing much then its time to run terminal and command:
top
and check what is running with high cpu.

Also very obvious things to do are:
- remove all widgets from your dekstops and use it for couple of days. Do you notice any difference?

Similar problems have been posted on this thread:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=42500&page=3

But mine seemed much more widespread than the ones discussed there (hence the separate thread). It may be that this is due to some widget as seems to be suggested in that thread or it might just be general unresponsiveness of the phone which is why I'd like to get a feel if many users have a similar issue.

@sgbirch: so you really can have multiple browser windows open (say 3-4), listen to music, and then receive a phone call without the phone getting very laggy? Do you keep browser windows open for a long time or are you good about closing them when you're done? Do you have a large music library?


thanks

masq, what you're describing seems like it's only you and a couple other people are experiencing that.. but the general mass that owns the N900 (like myself) aren't experiencing anything close to that.. My N900 is really fast.. everything opens as soon as I touch.. Task manager opens as soon as I tap on the screen to switch applications.. I can run multiple applications and still use it with no problems at all..

So the problem here is with your N900, you might have a defect somehow or you might need to flash your firmware.

Ok, here's my 0.02 €:

Generally, I'm not having any major issues with the device speed. However, there are some things that will make the device unacceptably unresponsive (try scp:ing in a lot of music files for example).

You're not specifying what format your music is in, or if the websites you have open are heavy. Some music formats on the device get played with DSP acceleration, while others (like Ogg Vorbis) unfortunately won't. For the websites, there are some that will even slow my dual-core laptop to a crawl.

Considering the mobility (dimensions, weight) of the device, I'm quite happy with the performance.

One thing that may cause major UI latency is swapping. When the device runs out of RAM, it moves some RAM content to disk (i.e. swaps). If something that the software suddenly needs is swapped out to disk, bringing it back in may cause large delays in operation.

Linux has a system variable called swappiness, which controls balance between keeping program code in RAM or using RAM as filesystem cache (google for 'swappiness' for more details). On the default settings, swappiness is set to 100 (which is the maximum) on N900. In my experience from desktop world, lower swappiness values may give better UI responsiveness when many applications are being used, but I really have not gotten around to play with this variable on the N900.

I agree with this point, there are some annoyances here. However it's nothing that a good firmware update couldn't fix ;-)

I'm a developer myself, so I'm comfortable with "world not being ready". While it's true that there are not that many apps currently available, I believe that the situation will get better over time.

@slender:

thanks for the help with this. my rootfs is 73% full with 60.4M left (out of 227M). Why is that an issue?

I have the cpu load applet installed and it often hits the red bar and not when I'm particularly doing anything interesting (though sometimes its cause its trying to connect to the 3g network). The problem is that when this happens the phone gets very sluggish and it takes forever to open a terminal and get top up and then I don't see anything weird.

This really feels to me like swapping problems from back in the days when we didn't have gigs of ram but when I check top I don't see any process eating up too much memory.

In the thread from my last post the "personal ip" widget was suggested as a possible culprit and it might be so I disabled it. I can try to kill all the other widgets for a few days and see how things go but its also hard to intentionally reproduce the problem.

I haven't been too careful about this but just opening a bunch of apps and using them the phone stays pretty responsive. After a few days however it seems that the phone randomly gets less responsive when a few browser windows are open. I haven't tested this carefully enough to be sure this is the pattern but the problem reappears a lot but I just can't consistently figure out its cause.

Today for instance I had only the music player loaded (and paused) yet when I received a phone call the phone screen stayed blank until i missed the call. It also took a few presses of the power button to get a live screen to swipe my finger accross (and my phone does not have a lock code). The only other thing besides the music player was that there was a waiting message notification for me. In the thread I linked to above message notifications seem to be linked to this sort of slowdown a lot.

The same here, no slow downs. Did you ever try a reboot? Before firmware 1.1 I noticed -as reports show somewhere here- that the history in MicroB must be deleted regularly, or the browser would indeed slow down. Now I don,t need to do that anymore.