Caltrops - Tansin A. Darcos's Alter Ego - Re: I understand more. about why my Android tablet sometimes is slow

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Re: I understand more. about why my Android tablet sometimes is slow by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 09/16/2019, 4:05pm PDT

Bad Sector wrote:

The number of services shouldn't matter, it is only the processes that aren't idle that matter. Even then, that is only on the CPU side and in general an 8-core ARM should be more than fine for most tasks.

There is what they can advertise, and there is what a savvy consumer can find out with a little detective work. I have two tablets, both advertised as having 4GB of RAM, and 64GB.,of internal storage, erroneously called ROM (which might be more accurately described as "disc space" - that being something people understand from PCs - or "flash memory"), and an 8-core processor . With two standard Android tools - or more appropriately,, pre-installed system apps - Settings and File Manager, I discover,through file manager that yes, they have 64GB of internal storage. Settings memory option in both cases claims 3.7 GB free (presumably the rest is the Linux operating system and maybe X Windowing System [or whatever handles Android's GUI]) and with 9 typical apps I use running, the memory in use is about 780 Meg, leaving about 3GB free.

However, with Terminal Emulator, I have the opportunity to look under the façade of Android and see the underlying Linux system in text mode, which can - to a trained observer - expose a lot of dirty secrets. e.g. using the command

cat /proc/cpuinfo

Lets me find out, on one tablet, it does not have eight cores, it has three, numbered 0, 1, and 2. The other tablet, which cost $20 less, has four, numbered 0, 1, 2, and 3. So part of the problem is neither has as many cores as promised. (And no, I don't consider thread count in evaluating processors, you only consider thread count when buying bed sheets.)

Bad Sector wrote:

A more likely reason is that your tablet does not have enough RAM (Android software tend to be hungry for RAM) and that forces the OS to use your unused storage space as a temporary place (essentially swapping).

I know what swapping is, I used to work on mainframes, and it was,much more common there and was an ~~old~~ well established idea in 1978.

Bad Sector wrote:

However if you also do not have much free space, the OS is unloading any storage-backed memory mapped data (usually code, but also assets, etc) to gain some memory - but then once that unloaded data is needed again (which can happen as fast as a fraction of a millisecond later - especially for code) it needs to be loaded (potentially by forcing something else to be unloaded). The end result is your device doing a lot of storage I/O (mostly I, less O :-P) as the kernel is trying its hardest to avoid issuing a memory error (it'd rather slow things down than start killing programs - modern software isn't written with the assumption that memory allocation requests fail)..

And they had a name for that too back in the late '70s and early '80s, thrashing.

Bad Sector wrote:

Despite the fast CPUs,.

,I don't consider 1.8GHz processors to be "fast." This isn't 2003.

Bad Sector wrote:

these cheap tablets tend to have slow flash storage that can dramatically slow down performance once that storage is used for anything more than occasional asynchronous access. When it comes to Android, choosing a device with more RAM is much more important for the device's overall responsiveness than its CPU performance.

I don't have the luxury or the option to buy more expensive tablets, given what little I do have left now I can barely afford these. In any event, I don't think resource starvation is an issue. I typically never see the tablet using more than 800m of memory even with 9 typical apps running, thus I doubt it has either thrashing or swapping problems. With 3GB of memory left it has no business (or reason) to do either.

I understand more. about why my Android tablet sometimes is slow by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 08/21/2019, 8:17pm PDT NEW

Your $64 tablet is sometimes slow? No way NT by Eurotrash 08/27/2019, 11:55pm PDT NEW

Re: I understand more. about why my Android tablet sometimes is slow by Bad Sector 09/13/2019, 4:34am PDT NEW

Re: I understand more. about why my Android tablet sometimes is slow by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 09/16/2019, 4:05pm PDT NEW