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Help Triumph memory leak SOLVED

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BillCumming

Lurker
To the forum admin: please consider making this post "sticky".

My Motorola Triumph from Virgin Mobile has been leaking memory for quite some time. It got down to 30 MB free in the phone ROM and was refusing to accept text messages, among other problems. I cleared the cache, moved apps to the SD card, uninstalled everything I could - to no avail. I did a factory reset (ugh!) which temporarily solved the problem (back up to 876 MB free), but within 2 1/2 weeks I was down to 756 MB. Clearly this is not sustainable.
HOWEVER, BELOW IS A SOLUTION FOR THE MEMORY LEAK.

My thanks to perfectstranger in post #27 of [FONT=&quot]http://androidforums.com/motorola-triumph/494070-alog-files.html in this very forum for getting me started.[/FONT]

The underlying problem is rumored to be that
 
What is a "memory leak"?

Alternately, for the problem I had which is the creation of alog files which accumulate and fill up the internal memory, you can root the phone with a simple 2 line command with the terminal emulator app, and delete the files once a month or so with a file app like ES.
I think a problem with your approach is that the phone now won't create any alog files EVER. Aren't there situations where the system, or someone fixing it, might need to know the last things the phone was doing before it crashed?
 
batvette said:
What is a "memory leak"?

Alternately, for the problem I had which is the creation of alog files which accumulate and fill up the internal memory, you can root the phone with a simple 2 line command with the terminal emulator app, and delete the files once a month or so with a file app like ES.
I think a problem with your approach is that the phone now won't create any alog files EVER. Aren't there situations where the system, or someone fixing it, might need to know the last things the phone was doing before it crashed?
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I believe I've seen MTDEV team members telling people to do this as well, if ur phone is running perfectly I don't see why u would need the alog anyway

And the memory leak the op is talking about is what u were saying in ur first sentence, even if u do nothing but make calls on ur phone eventually the alogs file will grow so large you'll get errors evertime you attempt todo anything at all cause there isn't enough memory

That's why they call it a "leak" cause before we knew it was the slots all we knew was the memory was going somewhere lol
 
Tokens210 said:
I believe I've seen MTDEV team members telling people to do this as well, if ur phone is running perfectly I don't see why u would need the alog anyway

And the memory leak the op is talking about is what u were saying in ur first sentence, even if u do nothing but make calls on ur phone eventually the alogs file will grow so large you'll get errors evertime you attempt todo anything at all cause there isn't enough memory

That's why they call it a "leak" cause before we knew it was the slots all we knew was the memory was going somewhere lol
Click to expand...

"Memory leak" is probably as good a term as any...with PCs it usually refers to RAM tho when an application continues to eat up more & more memory & won't release it and the only real fix is to reboot the system & clear out the RAM. At least, that's where I first heard the term used...
 
Memory leak is an old programmer's term used when your available memory keeps "leaking" (down the drain as far as I'm concerned) until you have none left. Almost always due to a software bug.

For the folks who don't know where to go to find your available memory (the memory that's leaking in this case): Go to the main phone Settings menu, SD Card and Phone Storage. In that page you'll see Internal Phone Storage Available Space. That's the number that will shrink until your phone won't let you do much of anything. The phone will start throwing up all sorts of error messages somewhere near 30-35 MB or less.

Personally I'd rather not have to go in every few months and delete the files, which is why I marked them read-only. That said, I acknowledge batvette's point that I don't know what they're used for, but clearly when it's generating so many files as to fill up the phone, that's not a normal system usage. So far I haven't seen anything break from marking them read-only, but it's only been a day or two. If I see problems I'll post back here.
 
BillCumming said:
Memory leak is an old programmer's term used when your available memory keeps "leaking" (down the drain as far as I'm concerned) until you have none left. Almost always due to a software bug.

For the folks who don't know where to go to find your available memory (the memory that's leaking in this case): Go to the main phone Settings menu, SD Card and Phone Storage. In that page you'll see Internal Phone Storage Available Space. That's the number that will shrink until your phone won't let you do much of anything. The phone will start throwing up all sorts of error messages somewhere near 30-35 MB or less.

Personally I'd rather not have to go in every few months and delete the files, which is why I marked them read-only. That said, I acknowledge batvette's point that I don't know what they're used for, but clearly when it's generating so many files as to fill up the phone, that's not a normal system usage. So far I haven't seen anything break from marking them read-only, but it's only been a day or two. If I see problems I'll post back here.
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Yeah though of course I was kind of being a smart*** it seems like the problem is the memory is filling up so the description seems off. Semantics debates are always a waste of time so....

Funny you wouldn't believe what went on about this in the Motorola forums, with the poor admin between a corporate rock and a customer hard place trying to moderate.
Motorola's answer is to DO A HARD RESET AND THE PROBLEM IS SOLVED (oh yeah sure you just burn in hell and your little Satan's offspring too, corporate wonks!) and people kept coming into the forum saying "no just root the phone with terminal emulator and..." and the mod deletes any mention of anything Motorola doesn't want us to do with the phone. But won't lift a finger to fix the problem.
Really opened my eyes to what a bad corporation they are, however that is all too common. If you owned a Sony Playstation 2 and got the "disc read error" bug you know the feeling. They shipped millions of consoles they knew would go bad and charged consumers $125 a pop to make them right. Every person that called with a bad one were told theirs was the first that had that problem.
 
I'll just do that step two every once in a while. After a year and a half.. I was down to about 100MB free. Now I'm back to almost 600
 
I wish I had searched for this sooner. I've gotten this low memory warning for a couple of months. I moved stuff, deleted stuff and still got it.

My alog_events size was 720,504,789!

I also only did steps 1, 2, and 4 for now. But I bookmarked this page, for sure.

Many, many thanks.
 
BillCumming - thanks for your time in squashing this one. The writeup is crystal clear for me.
Like DesertDave I've been working around this for a couple weeks. I was thinking this was my issue because it has taken over a year to have this problem on my phone. My alog_events was 600MB!
This is my first time poking around the Android OS so maybe this does not make sense but where is the alog configured? Can't we just reconfigure the logs to limit them to say 10MB? Would the reconfigure be reset when I reboot?
Just a thought.
 
Does this solution also work on Custom Roms? VM reset my sockets which solved the problem but now im plauged with bugs aka: multiple incoming messages of same type, send errors etc. btw MTDEV CM9 Tester.

Update: This does not work with custom roms as there are no alog files created. These files only exsit in Stock OS.
 
SlevinKalevra said:
Does this solution also work on Custom Roms? VM reset my sockets which solved the problem but now im plauged with bugs aka: multiple incoming messages of same type, send errors etc. btw MTDEV CM9 Tester.

Update: This does not work with custom roms as there are no alog files created. These files only exsit in Stock OS.
Click to expand...

if i recall correctly, i think custom roms do have alogs but there set to delete themselves upon reboot/shut down, or if they grow to large

has been awhile since ive been around and i usually stick to CM7 so things may have changed lol

also im running CM7 and i get duplicate messages to but only in the past week or so and the cm7 im running is from 3-3-2013, so im guessing its a network issue
 
Tokens210 said:
if i recall correctly, i think custom roms do have alogs but there set to delete themselves upon reboot/shut down, or if they grow to large

has been awhile since ive been around and i usually stick to CM7 so things may have changed lol

also im running CM7 and i get duplicate messages to but only in the past week or so and the cm7 im running is from 3-3-2013, so im guessing its a network issue
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Yeah ive been getting the duplicates every once in a while. If my data goes out and comes back in as soon as i get a text, i usually get a duplicate.
 
warrior12 said:
Yeah ive been getting the duplicates every once in a while. If my data goes out and comes back in as soon as i get a text, i usually get a duplicate.
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Yea, also rebooting the phone right after receiving a message and I've seen it a few times when the phones like completely dead and about to shut itself off
 
Hi! New here, and not at all phone fixing smart. ;) But this was SUPER easy to follow! Thanks! I did steps 1,2, & 4(too late for my brain for step 3;P), and holy smokes! Problem fixed(for now)! Thanks again!
 
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