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Root GalaxHero ROM slower than thought?

GalaxyMeh

Member
I'm using the GalaxHero ROM (based on II5), and I think drakaz did a great job. Thank you!

I'm not using compcache/swap, and the problem I'm having is that the ROM seems slow. Posted on HDblog.it but got no answer so far, so I thought I'd ask here:

1. For example, after I exit some applications, it takes ~5 seconds for the home screen icons to appear.

2. Worse, Waze stutters when it speaks directions. (Waze is an awesome GPS navigation app, free, with crowdsourced, community-built maps and live traffic, much like OpenStreetMaps.) Anyway, T-Mobile G1 users report that Waze does not stutter on their devices.

Can anyone reproduce these? Should I buy a class 6 SD card and use swapping?
 
do you have quite alot of icons on the home screens?
have you tried waze on a standard ii5 build as i cant see it being slower than standard ii5 in any way
 
I have the Google search bar widget, and 9 icons on the home screen. I did notice that GalaxHero came with the Google search bar on the screen page to the right of the center screen, but I moved on the center page.

Haven't tried Waze on bare II5.
 
I found the cause of this slowdown:

I had AndNav2 installed, with the offline map of the entire USA. Due to AndNav2's idiotic storage model, that unzipped map consisted of about 65,000 (sixty-five thousand) PNG files.

AndNav2 was never running, so I'm not sure why exactly just having those files in /sdcard/andnav2/ slowed down the Galaxy so much. But after deleting them (I had to SSH in and run rm -rf, because ASTRO would force close/time out every time), my Galaxy is way faster, and Waze stutters much less.
 
I had a similar problem to this also where once I pressed the home key it would take a while for the icons to appear. I found that after uninstalling Advanced Task Killer it did not do this anymore and became smooth.
 
I think I did when I had it installed. But will try installing again to make double sure it wasn't that. Also it Advanced Task Killer would not allways load too.

EDIT:
It does seem that when I load Advanced task manager it seems to load and leave a blank screen
 
I wonder if it was quickdroid trying to index them? I totally removed quickdroid, but just disabling it is probably good enough.
 
Kam i've been trying to work out how to uinstall quickdroid? If I look in manage applications it does not allow me to uninstall. And appmanager does not even list it
 
You need to use adb shell

# Remount read/write
adb remount

# open shell
adb shell

# go to apps directory
cd /data/app_s

# delete QuickDroid
rm QuickDroid.apk

# delete NPS sync
rm wssyncmlnps.apk

-----

Do an 'ls' to check the name of quickdroid, but i think thats what it was called. Case matters so make sure to use capitals letters where they are. You can also delete the nps sync app, since NPS is pretty useless!

Keep it if you want to use NPS for updating. But I assume since you have a custom rom, you wont ever use NPS with this firmware.

BTW you can type 'top' in the shell to see what processes are running, the % memory and CPU they are using. Handy to keep that running whyle u remove widgets and close apps to test stuff
 
Hmm any idea what npsmobex is? I one a strings and i see a load of sync stuff in it. Is it obex authentication for the sync, or maybe sync over bluetooth?

Anyway I cant easily modify the init.rc without remaking the rom so i just renamed it:

mv /system/bin/npsmobex /system/bin/npsmobex.off

Now after reboot, and killing the left over task taskbar shows i have 37 mb free :)
(compcache off btw) The fact that i now have left over tasks with compcache off means it definatly has more ram available!

If someone is using a bluetooth device could they check it still works after doing this?

Do undo obviously just rename it back and reboot:

mv /system/bin/npsmobex.off /system/bin/npsmobex

Now, what else can i kill :P
 
So to answer my own question that i had is one of these threads...

"why does free show only 17372kb free, but taskbar (part of taskiller) show 35mb free?"

Code:
/ # free
              total         used         free       shared      buffers
  Mem:        95948        78576        17372            0          568
 Swap:            0            0            0
Total:        95948        78576        17372

/ # cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:        95948 kB
MemFree:         17372 kB
Buffers:           276 kB
Cached:          19172 kB

Libraries are cached into RAM in case they might need to be used. This RAM is technically free, because the cache can be dropped and the memory overwriten if needed. Free shows the ACTUAL memory that's totally free. A cat of meminfo shows you the free memory and the memory being used to cachelibraries.

So in the above case the actual usable memory is 17372 + 19172 kbs, which is (17372 + 19172)/1024 = 35.6875 Mb of free usable ram :)

Really, if you type 'free' and see alot of free ram there, that means the system is caching normally and still has a load of RAM free. If you see 2 or 3mb, then its having to drop some caches to keep some instant RAM free.
 
Right just done what you said above. And a cat /proc/meminfo shows this:-
MemTotal: 95948 kB
MemFree: 1656 kB
Buffers: 100 kB
Cached: 20852 kB

And free displays this
total used free shared buffers
Mem: 95948 94212 1736 0 428
Swap: 0 0 0
Total: 95948 94212 1736

So by doing this is it good for the mem?
 
So you have 1.6mb free, and 20.36 free memory being used for caches - total free about 22mb. Do you have compcache on or off?

So turning mobex off saves about 5% memory best case, which is about 5mb.

On a seperate note...

The same cat of meminfo shows that just under 64mb is being mapped out to devices. That means the other frimware in the app processor is using just under 64mb of memory, leaving 128mb for the OS. We have 93.70mb available, so where is the other 34mb, and can we steal some of it?

VmallocTotal: 409600 kB
VmallocUsed: 65300 kB -> 63.77mb
VmallocChunk: 312316 kB
 
Right have reset it backup again. On boot up i've run taskiler. Here is the output for free:-

Code:
              total         used         free       shared      buffers
  Mem:        95948        92620         3328            0         1468
 Swap:            0            0            0
Total:        95948        92620         3328
and the output for cat /proc/meminfo :-
Code:
MemTotal:        95948 kB
MemFree:          1824 kB
Buffers:          2288 kB
Cached:          22972 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:          73124 kB
Inactive:         6232 kB
SwapTotal:           0 kB
SwapFree:            0 kB
Dirty:               4 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
AnonPages:       54160 kB
Mapped:          17692 kB
Slab:             6160 kB
SReclaimable:     1748 kB
SUnreclaim:       4412 kB
PageTables:       3712 kB
NFS_Unstable:        0 kB
Bounce:              0 kB
WritebackTmp:        0 kB
CommitLimit:     47972 kB
Committed_AS:  1083196 kB
VmallocTotal:   409600 kB
VmallocUsed:     68384 kB
VmallocChunk:   308220 kB
And lastly the output for top :-

Code:
←[H←[JMem: 93480K used, 2468K free, 0K shrd, 2324K buff, 22912K cached
CPU:  9.0% usr  0.0% sys  0.0% nic 90.9% idle  0.0% io  0.0% irq  0.0% sirq
Load average: 3.21 3.27 1.61 2/217 1652
←[7m  PID  PPID USER     STAT   VSZ %MEM CPU %CPU COMMAND←[0m
 1652  1593 0        R     2064  2.1   0  9.0 top
 1097  1020 1000     S     155m166.0   0  0.0 system_server

 1159  1020 10005    S     131m139.8   0  0.0 android.process.acore

 1191  1020 10026    S     109m117.2   0  0.0 com.google.process.gapps

 1314  1020 10005    S     103m110.2   0  0.0 com.android.inputmethod.latin

 1157  1020 1001     S     100m107.3   0  0.0 com.android.phone

 1513  1020 10074    S    94984 98.8   0  0.0 com.levelup.beautifulwidgets

 1545  1020 10075    S    94696 98.5   0  0.0 com.twidroidpro:remote

 1203  1020 10004    S    94232 98.0   0  0.0 android.process.media

 1406  1020 10075    S    93448 97.2   0  0.0 com.twidroidpro

 1521  1020 10035    S    93284 97.0   0  0.0 com.google.android.gm

 1369  1020 10058    S    92132 95.8   0  0.0 com.android.alarmclock

 1020     1 0        S    71300 74.2   0  0.0 zygote /bin/app_process -Xzygote /

 1021     1 1013     S    21708 22.5   0  0.0 /system/bin/mediaserver
 1018     1 1001     S     9576  9.9   0  0.0 /system/bin/rild
 1019     1 0        S     8500  8.8   0  0.0 /system/bin/drexe
 1025     1 0        S     3328  3.4   0  0.0 /sbin/adbd
 1145     1 0        S     2012  2.0   0  0.0 /system/bin/wpa_supplicant -Dwext

 1593  1025 0        S     1400  1.4   0  0.0 /system/bin/bash -
q1017     1 0        S     1276  1.3   0  0.0 /system/bin/akmd2
I hope this helps?
 
Hmmm... this drexe seems to be by samsung and it calls npsmobex

Oh and npsmobex has a lot of syncml strings in it. Seems like samsung did include a nice syncml server in the phone. Pity it doesn't have a good client.
 
Looks fine, the programs you're running are using the other 20mb or so. Here's the tasks with descriptiont. I'm checking out drexe now

Code:
←[H←[JMem: 93480K used, 2468K free, 0K shrd, 2324K buff, 22912K cached
CPU:  9.0% usr  0.0% sys  0.0% nic 90.9% idle  0.0% io  0.0% irq  0.0% sirq
Load average: 3.21 3.27 1.61 2/217 1652
←[7m  PID  PPID USER     STAT   VSZ %MEM CPU %CPU COMMAND←[0m
 1652  1593 0        R     2064  2.1   0  9.0 top
# core System process
 1097  1020 1000     S     155m166.0   0  0.0 system_server 
 
# android core process
 1159  1020 10005    S     131m139.8   0  0.0 android.process.acore 
 
# handles all the google apps
 1191  1020 10026    S     109m117.2   0  0.0 com.google.process.gapps 
 
# keyboard and locale
 1314  1020 10005    S     103m110.2   0  0.0 com.android.inputmethod.latin 
 
# handles phone functions
 1157  1020 1001     S     100m107.3   0  0.0 com.android.phone 
 
# widgets app
 1513  1020 10074    S    94984 98.8   0  0.0 com.levelup.beautifulwidgets 
 
# twidpro (twitter client)
 1545  1020 10075    S    94696 98.5   0  0.0 com.twidroidpro:remote 
 
# handles android media functions
 1203  1020 10004    S    94232 98.0   0  0.0 android.process.media 
 
# twidpro (twitter client)
 1406  1020 10075    S    93448 97.2   0  0.0 com.twidroidpro 
 
# no idea.  google maps?
 1521  1020 10035    S    93284 97.0   0  0.0 com.google.android.gm
 
# alarm clock, you can kill it, but you only save a few mb, and your alarms wont go off!
 1369  1020 10058    S    92132 95.8   0  0.0 com.android.alarmclock 
 
# system process, handles forking requests
 1020     1 0        S    71300 74.2   0  0.0 zygote /bin/app_process -Xzygote / 
 
# Handles media player, camera etc.  Also the headset keys for music get intercepted by this process
 1021     1 1013     S    21708 22.5   0  0.0 /system/bin/mediaserver 
 
# radio interface layer, an API to the modem
 1018     1 1001     S     9576  9.9   0  0.0 /system/bin/rild 
 
# Gets baseband info for NPS.  Not needed
 1019     1 0        S     8500  8.8   0  0.0 /system/bin/drexe 
 
# adb daemon
 1025     1 0        S     3328  3.4   0  0.0 /sbin/adbd 
 
# handles WPA encryption for wifi
 1145     1 0        S     2012  2.0   0  0.0 /system/bin/wpa_supplicant -Dwext 
 
# bash shell
 1593  1025 0        S     1400  1.4   0  0.0 /system/bin/bash - 
 
# handles auto rotate
 1017     1 0        S     1276  1.3   0  0.0 /system/bin/akmd2
 
Ok so drexe seems to grab info from the baseband using AT commands. That can go too :)

# Remount read/write
adb remount

# open shell
adb shell

# go to apps directory
cd /data/app_s

# delete QuickDroid
rm QuickDroid.apk

# delete NPS sync
rm wssyncmlnps.apk

# disable drexe
mv /system/bin/drexe /system/bin/drexe.off

# disable npsmobex
mv /system/bin/npsmobex /system/bin/npsmobex.off

oh and to flush the cash and get a good baseline of free memory you can run this:

sync ; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches ; echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches ; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches ; cat /proc/meminfo ; free


Total memory after boot with all tasks killed:

Code:
MemTotal:        95948 kB
MemFree:         23308 kB
Buffers:            44 kB
Cached:          15392 kB

a total of (23308 + 15392)/1024 = 37.79296875
 
# Remount read/write
adb remount

# open shell
adb shell

# go to apps directory
cd /data/app_s

# delete QuickDroid
rm QuickDroid.apk

Em, sorry to be retrded, but where are you typing those commands!? I'm in work so not at my home computer, but are you typing those in cmd once the phone is mounted in debugging mode, or is there an adb.exe command prompt-style program in the "tools" folder I downloaded to put galaxhero on??

One other thing - has anyone noticed that if you use the "touch input" keyboard instead of the android one on galaxhero that the suggesstions that pop up when your typing actually cover the words being typed, rather than sit below the text area like with the android keyboard?? Kinda makes the touch input keyboard unusable..
 
Em, sorry to be retrded, but where are you typing those commands!? I'm in work so not at my home computer, but are you typing those in cmd once the phone is mounted in debugging mode, or is there an adb.exe command prompt-style program in the "tools" folder I downloaded to put galaxhero on??

One other thing - has anyone noticed that if you use the "touch input" keyboard instead of the android one on galaxhero that the suggesstions that pop up when your typing actually cover the words being typed, rather than sit below the text area like with the android keyboard?? Kinda makes the touch input keyboard unusable..

adb.exe is in the same folder as fastboot which is "tools"

i dont like the htc keyboard even before it was on galaxhero, i use betterkeyboard. its a paid app but it works wonderfully
 
Are there any known issues with galaxhero RE 3g connectivity? Since i mounted it to remove quickdroid i cant seem to reconnect to it, but what im not sure is whether 3g had already been dropped when i came into my apartment (where i normally have full 3g coverage).

3g was working this morning on my galaxhero btw.

Edit: A re-registering on the network and reboot solved it :-)
 
hi to all,
today i was in town shopping and somehow went to 3 shop to check what's new and i saw HTC Hero that was connected and working. so i checked it quickly to see how it compares to Galaxy.
DAMN Hero is fast, huh actually i took my Galaxy out of my pocket and couldn't believe how much faster Hero is with millions of widgets on all 7screens. and app launching so fast and browser. i compared almost everything (keyboard, apps, market, camera, sound) damn this thing is good.
so just wanted to ask if anyone with GalexoRom or other customised versions of Galaxy managed to get at least close to speed of Hero.
and another question is why Hero is so much faster than Galaxy even though i think the processor is the same just Ram is way much more (is it because of that? )
thanx
btw still haven't rooted mine as haven't had much time today
 
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