Slowness in N900
 

I've been using the N900 that I received in the summit for a few weeks now as my primary and only phone (so let's not forget that I am talking about a preproduction device here). Everything mostly works well, but sometimes the thing just gets really really slow while using certain apps like E-mail or Maps, or updating the software catalog. Browsing the web may do this, perhaps when opening a complicated page or a page with a lot of flash. In this situation the music player starts making short frequent pauses and the user interface gets slow. I also get unrecognized taps or one tap recognized multiple times (or perhaps there are problems playing the tap sound effect - that's how I recognize it).

Does anybody else experience this or do I have something wrong with this particular device?

This is just a hunch/guess but perhaps there is something wrong with the flash memory (or memory handing)? The device acts really slow whenever there's more than a little I/O going on. An extreme example was when trying to copy a gigabyte of music from the microSD card (using cp in shell) to the internal memory and simply jammed the whole thing. It never finished and I had to reboot. It just totally stopped after a few hundred megabytes.

To see what I mean, run:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/user/MyDocs/foo bs=1M

and wait for a while. Try opening other apps or generally doing anything while dd is running. My device is nearly unusable. This is of course a really extreme example, but in my opinion high I/O load should not halt the device to such a crawl. And no UI slowness at all when there is less than full use of I/O.

Is there a setting somewhere to tweak I/O behaviour for testing purposes? Could it be helped by altering some process priorities?

Re: Slowness in N900
 

I've only rarely had a problem with speed... media player might skip once or twice a day but that's about all I've seen.

Re: Slowness in N900
 

Sounds like the OS has put some things in swap and intensive I/O is preventing it to fetch things from there quickly...

Re: Slowness in N900
 

kernel has 80 MB io cache, when that gets full in file io operations, your apps might move to swap. That means simultaneous writes (apparently) to the same volume, and in the worst case also swapping content in, which will in turn swap something more out and the devious circle is complete. Anyway, much better on the sales release. Don't sweat about that.

Re: Slowness in N900
 

Ok, that's really relieving to hear!

Re: Slowness in N900
 

This is my greatest concern - I am almost sure this device will get very slow after a month of using it...hope not.

Re: Slowness in N900
 

My Nokia N810 is still hanging in there, it has its moments from time to time- like every device I've ever used incidentally -I expect the N900 to put it to shame, but the odd slow downs seem inevitable.

As long as it runs FBReader, browses the web and works well with *insert random podcast app here* I don't care.

Re: Slowness in N900
 

Wait, so if I download a ton of apps on my N900 does that mean my phone will get slow just because I've downloaded them or are you talking about actually running a ton of apps at the same time?

Re: Slowness in N900
 

How so and why a month?

Re: Slowness in N900
 

No, it does not.