Hi there,
I have a rooted 2019 F7 (Mustang) - stock rom - to be honest it's not a great performer but the form factor is spot on. I need a fix or workaround for playing music + browsing at the same time.
I'm struggling to get the F7 to do simple multi tasking for example, playing music via Spotify, or a Radio app whle browsing the web.
I've tried the usual "tricks" to keep Android memory manager at bay, and stop it closing my music in the background e.g:
- a 4gb swap partition in /data/ via apps2sd;
- using termux to create a swap file, both in /data/ and /cache/;
- Using Swapper (root) to create a swap file; and
- various swappiness settings using teh above.
Swap seems to work superficially, as the partitions are shown as free memory whenI run
Code:
free -m
in terminal, however, the amount of memory used suggests the system is not utilising them beyond a few MB over ZRAM.
In any event - is there some clever workaround I can use to either keep my apps music alive / listen adn browse in the same browser etc?
thephatmaster said:
Hi there,
I have a rooted 2019 F7 (Mustang) - stock rom - to be honest it's not a great performer but the form factor is spot on. I need a fix or workaround for playing music + browsing at the same time.
I'm struggling to get the F7 to do simple multi tasking for example, playing music via Spotify, or a Radio app whle browsing the web.
I've tried the usual "tricks" to keep Android memory manager at bay, and stop it closing my music in the background e.g:
- a 4gb swap partition in /data/ via apps2sd;
- using termux to create a swap file, both in /data/ and /cache/;
- Using Swapper (root) to create a swap file; and
- various swappiness settings using teh above.
Swap seems to work superficially, as the partitions are shown as free memory whenI run in terminal, however, the amount of memory used suggests the system is not utilising them beyond a few MB over ZRAM.
In any event - is there some clever workaround I can use to either keep my apps music alive / listen adn browse in the same browser etc?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Best solution IME is a 192MB (or so) swap file in the /cache partition with priorities set to favor the exiting 64MB ZRAM based swap. Set swappiness to ~10 and call it a day. Spinning up a huge static swap partition in /data won't help (will likely have the opposite effect) as the low-end eMMC overtaxes the annemic processor on large comprssion/decompression tasks. The small static swap gives the ROM some 'breathing room' which reduces most lags/stalls on boot and wake from sleep. Better but not great.
Browsing is particularly taxing on this device (albeit typical behavior on a low RAM gizmo). Might try a browser that renders in the cloud like Opera Mini or Opera w/data saver enabled. Stick to a tab or two and use the integrated ad blocker (I prefer VPN based blockers but that's OT). Even with those measures browsing will be a painful experience if the tab is doing anything else that actively utilizes limited resources. Good luck.
I'll give that a go. Two things:
My system reports 256mb Zram - is that compressed into 64mb or something?
Opera mini doesn't work on the Fire 7, nearest I found is puffin - which is heavy slow and buggy
thephatmaster said:
I'll give that a go. Two things:
My system reports 256mb Zram - is that compressed into 64mb or something?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My error; forgot Mustang defaults to 256MB ZRAM on FireOS v6. That could part of the problem when fully utilized as it reduces available uncompressed RAM which is much faster given the low end processor which must handle compression/decompression. Note ZRAM only consumes as much RAM as needed. A tool like DiskInfo will give a graphical readout of utilization.
thephatmaster said:
Opera mini doesn't work on the Fire 7, nearest I found is puffin - which is heavy slow and buggy
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try the full version of Opera with 'data saver' enabled. In that mode it operates much like Opera Mini from a workload and memory footprint perspective. Mini works fine on the hardware; FireOS v6 is the bad boy (likely missing libraries).
Related
ROM: CM6 from 08.12.2010
Overclocking: Interactive governor : 1000mhz : vsel 62
Launcher: Launcher Pro
Note: I disabled "keep home in memory"
I was using 800mhz with 52 vsel and vm heap size 32 and I wanted to test an app "TV Flash"
It's an app that plays tv through flash and I was keep getting app crashes everytime I played my favorite channel.
I overclocked as mentioned above (1000mhz ....) and I set the vm heap size to 50m.
I believe this is the amount of ram that can be alocated to an app. Am i right?
Now my favorite channel plays flawless.
My question is:
Is there a problem of keeping the vm heap size to 50m, 64m?
Thanks guys!
Nope, no problems. Just that you'll run out of memory very quickly if you do something intensive.
Lollipop_Lawlipop said:
Nope, no problems. Just that you'll run out of memory very quickly if you do something intensive.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well then...It seems that I missunderstood what vm heap size is!
Can you please explain and recommend a way so I wont run out of ram when watching live streams?
And do you think that the release of froyo will fix this issue?
There's nothing you can really do about it. You'll just have home reloaded and other applications closed. The only solution is to buy a phone with 512mb of memory.
Froyo isn't a magical upgrade. The most we will probably see from the firmware is feature parity with the Milestone 2 (minus Milestone 2 specific features and BLUR). All performance related stuff is mostly in our hands already (think JIT).
[EDIT] JIT actually takes up a bit more of your RAM. The difference is quite noticeable if you multitask a lot.
Is there a optimal heap size we should use? What effects does it have if you set the heap size smaller or greater?
Just tried increasing the heap size on my phone. Set it to 48MB and angry birds, my text editors, etc, all finally run consistently smooth. Launcher reloads more often now, but that's not a big deal given the much improved in app experience for me.
Sworkhard said:
Just tried increasing the heap size on my phone. Set it to 48MB and angry birds, my text editors, etc, all finally run consistently smooth. Launcher reloads more often now, but that's not a big deal given the much improved in app experience for me.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes...Apps seem to not crash because they are being allocated more memory..
I was wondering:
A friend of mine said something like this "Android doesnt need more than 256mb of ram to run smoothly...but due to poor coding app developers dont seem to align or match their apps with the specifications of the android system"
Example: Dolphin HD crashes a lot when playing or viewing flash content and it seems to eat (when selecting heap size 64m) all of those 64mb that can be alocated to a process(app)...
What do you think guys?
yes, Dolphin HD really crashes more than the stock browser on my machine, with heap size set to default 32M
Dolphin HD crashes when I read some forums with very long passages, but the stock browser can display without problem.
Dolphin also occupies a lot of space for caching.
On my EeePC 900 with its slow "SSD" drives (very poor write speed), browsing performance is dramatically improved by having the web browser put its cache files into a RAMdrive. On Windows is this involves a RAMdrive driver that creates a fake HDD running in RAM, along with changing the browser configuration to point to that drive letter.
On Linux this can be done with some fstab tweaking, by creating a tmpfs filesystem.
Is something like that possible on the Nook Color? A RAMdrive of around 50MB in size should be enough. I imagine that the flash chip in the Nook Color has the same poor write speed as my EeePC (it certainly feels similar).
This also has the side bonus of reducing flash writes.
Hi,
I use a web radio application that does not use a tray icon, which means that androids built in RAM manager will close it if there's little RAM availible.
How can I prevent this? I don't care if the phone becomes choppy. I want to be able to listen to radio and browse the web at the same time.
Ideally I want to exclude this one particular app from any RAM management.
I have been working on a custom rom for my own peronal requirements, namly
1) low memory use
2) The best true hi-fi sound possible from a nexus 7
3) Getting the most data onscreen as possible
I decided to share my findings in hope that other more knowledgeable can point me in the right direction for my next step
1) The lowest memory use rom ( flashed as stock, ie no extra mods and kernel that came with the mod ) i have tried ( having tried about 20 different roms, 32 if you include updates ) is the Vanir based PRIME rom by prime directive
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2098139
As standard that reads an average of 400mb on a newly installed system ( after a full wipe including internal sd data ).
Obviously apps squew these statistics so tests are done with only the OS going, ie no app loaded. In my tests i used a custom gapps with only framework,login,setup,and phonesky, later i integrated those into my test rom.
Now if we flash a trinity ( alpha3 1700oc ) or Omega kernel that goes down to approx 300mb
Now if we load Rom Toolbox Pro, and advanced freeze the crappy google services from playstore and framework ( and freeze the downloaded services altogether ) this goes down to 270mb ( and no loss of function in playstore )
On my test system with the test rom i am using ( incorporating all the above and including multirom ) and 60+ apps ( mainly programming engineering git etc some autostarting ) i am running at 344mb ( measured through settings>apps>running ) or 260mb measured through Trickster mod.
2) I have found combining the KingBeats alsa binaries with V4A frontend gives the best sound in 2 scenarios.
a) Listening through high quality headphones, obviously you will be listening to FLAC's or raw WAVES ( maybe some of the other more esoteric lossless compressors ) and you DO NOT WANT any undue post processing of the digital audio stream ( ie equalizers and various audio effects which claim to "enhance" the sound ) so you use Andless ( which i have now included in my test rom ) which hits alsa directly bypassing the entire android audio enhancement chain. This with the much improved alsa binaries this gives the best sound possible with the on-board electronics.
b) Listening to radio etc through external portable speakers, Bluetooth or equivalent, or listening through crap headphones. Here quality counts less than portability and convenience and big benefits can be gained from post processing the audiostrem, so you are probably listening to streamed MP3 or AAC and possibly further streaming to a Bluetooth device over a VERY low bandwidth link, In this situation i use the included V4A settings util, which seems to be the best in this genera, just turn it on and play with the many settings till you get the mix you desire, this will in no way interfere with the sound quality from andless
3) I have my dpi cranked up to 140 and use my little finger and a stylus, i would like to go further and use desktop mode ( available from trhe power menu ) permanently, unfortunately There is a bug with the pie controls, and pie is not great anyway, so i am looking at integrating this project http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1788518
which has a really sweet touch navigation interface
I know my way round C a bit, lots of linux distro experience, not bad at bash, zero java
What do you guys think is my next step, do i need to learn some java and get hands dirty or can i find what am after out there somewhere
I been trying to find a very fast low ram setup myself in order to data log stuff for my vehicles. My best find so far was SLIMbean (everything not needed erased or frozen), along with Trinity (not current release). Kernel settings played a large improvement setting i\o to deadline, and oc to 1500-1600. Haven't tried the rom your specifying for this experiment, but will play with that. I need to log ~20 inputs at 1hz (1sec) for a few min, so a lot of read and writes happening at the same time.
gokart2 said:
I been trying to find a very fast low ram setup myself in order to data log stuff for my vehicles. My best find so far was SLIMbean (everything not needed erased or frozen), along with Trinity (not current release). Kernel settings played a large improvement setting i\o to deadline, and oc to 1500-1600. Haven't tried the rom your specifying for this experiment, but will play with that. I need to log ~20 inputs at 1hz (1sec) for a few min, so a lot of read and writes happening at the same time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Prime should be good for that, i think you'll be surprised at the stats for memory, be wary thou Prime 04-02 ( which is what im experimenting on ) has quite a few unresolved bugs, and since no one seems to run any kind of bug tracker ( bugzilla folkes ! ) they will only get resolved if and when Prime directive gets a new computer and finds them himself.
If you get really stuck knock together a specific linux setup and run it under multirom, you can use any of the linux based custom kernels ( that have the kex patch ) running init on a custom userland if your running a single application without xorg you can just init straight into it and cut out all the normal android and linux userland crap, just pick and compile what you need ( linux from scratch is your friend here ) to run your app, if its anything to do with linux its dependencies will be well documented. The obvious problem is user input since you dont have a keyboard and you are prob using the usb for you datalogger, any osk will mean xorg and a shed load of deps, but if its a auto setup maybe you can do with the 3 hardware buttons ?( accessible through acpi and udev rules ) for on-of etc, that will save you a shed load of ram.
If you really need input and an osk try Linux from scratch with E17, E17 is built for touch ( and multi-touch) screens so is sweet, and can run in as little as 100mb all in
I plan to turn this hunt into a rom one day, am hesitant to let my experimental one out since i have no real code input, ive just been swapping apk's bins etc and writing scripts, dont really constitute a new rom
I have dedicated my S5 to use as a midi synth player, together with a midi keyboard connected to the phone via an OTG adapter, outputting either through the built in audio out or perhaps a separate sound interface.
I have a newer phone (Xiaomi Redmi Note 7) but I'm going to try with the S5 as well, as a I read that of all the Android manufacturers Samsung has the best rep with audio latency.
I've also heard that a big leap was made with Android 9 and 10 on latency, some recent ROMs for the S5 based on android 9 and 10 are rather basic in terms of the features they support. So, I'm looking for recommendations for stock or custom ROM which support low audio latency use.
Thanks for your suggestions.
Hi,
I haven't tried using my s5 for midi, but in general, I would think the latency would depend as much on your kernel, CPU governor & especially I/O scheduler as the firmware.
Obviously, if you have a super-bloated rom there would be more background tasks by default to clog up the processor.
I would go for one of the debloated ones that support custom kernels and have a look around for the right kernel & I/O scheduler.
Another option would be to see if turning on the developer option to kill background processes affects the latency when in the midi app.
Looking forward to hear your results.
C:
Cheers
Highly recommend using the Tuned kernel if you're not using it. It works on various ROMs like LOS:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/ga...d-los-kernel-s5-performance-battery-t3893954/
You can configure the kernel with the Boeffla app. Just for fun I increased the max CPU speed to ~2.9 GHz and enabled the Tuned performance governor. The phone became hilariously responsive. I tried it out for a few days but it didn't really benefit me. It might benefit you though! Performance settings make it much harder for the phone to idle. In fact if you've ever had music stuttering it's from the phone playing a music codec the hardware can't accelerate while the CPU cores are in an idle state or turned off.
Having some success with this. By setting the CPU min frequency to be maxed out continuously at 2.457Ghz using and setting the Android task scheduler profile to 'deadline' using Kernel Adiutor, and assigning maximum priority to the task in question using 3C Toolbox, I was able to get one app (microphone pro) to go from 48000Hz + 480 frames per buffer, to 48000Hz + 240 frames per buffer. Not quite stable yet, but shows that tweaks are having an effect. Feels like a total latency (from key press to ear) of around 40 ms.
In the end the trouble I am having is finding applications that have latency configuration options with enough granularity to test out whether any system tweaks are making a useful difference. For example Caustic (synth app for android) only has five possible latency settings, the lowest being called 'lowest' (funnily enough), which was actually already stable before I got the tweaks going. Not like audio apps in Windows and Linux where you can choose different latency settings (sample rate, buffer size, etc.) with high granularity. Perhaps there are some apps out there that have this though, although I know Android does have a minimum system latency (20 ms I think I read) which apps can't go beyond currently. 20 ms whilst playing something on keyboard is a bit distracting for some, though probably would be possible to get used to it (latency when playing keyboard becomes unnoticable to me around <7ms personally, and I could probably learn to ignore greater values).
CPU tweaking apps tried so far actually only allow setting the minimum frequency of the CPU, so you can have it maxed out all the time, which is making a difference, but the ideal would be being able to experiment with proper overclocking. OS is LineageOS 16 (comes with it's own custom kernel). Modem and bootloader not sure but they are either those that come with LineageOS or the Marshmallow latest ones installed prior to LineageOS install (not sure if LineageOS installs any or leaves the modem and bootloader previously installed).
Boatshow said:
Highly recommend using the Tuned kernel if you're not using it. It works on various ROMs like LOS:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/ga...d-los-kernel-s5-performance-battery-t3893954/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
System wouldn't boot when I tried that Kernel. Not sure if I did something wrong. I went back to the LineageOS built in kernel and unfortunately it doesn't support Boeffla.