Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

I'd wager that it might have more to do with your network speed. With a slow enough network Modrana will spend enough time idle to allow the watchdog to recover.

I've never had a spontaneous reboot during Modrana downloads but I've had a lot of symptoms described in post #1497. This on devices with all sorts of configuration: stock, CSSU, swap on SD... makes no difference. If I leave it on its own for long enough (like 30 minutes or more), it wil get to the stage when the device appears completely dead and takes minutes to react to anything. Some people may not be that patient and may hust take the battery out - as I did once with inevitable consequences on the FS.

I guess if my network connection were any faster then I might even experience reboots like sixwheeledbeast.

Easy Debian is similar. I've never experienced reboots during large downloads but I have experienced them while copying the entire ED directory in one go. I've resolved it by either copying it in smaller chunks or by smacking 'nice' in front of 'cp'.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

It's a bit off-topic here, but just too to clarify - I've been doing it on very slow connection (16 kb/s), and on very fast one (faster than N900's wifi chip can handle, so it was limited by hardware, not server bandwidth, or mine).

I *used* to have same problem as you describe, looong ago, before moved swap to microSD exclusively *and* I've applied swap-related settings like ones, that I recommended in ED thread (based on freemangordon's ones, just tweaked a little). Since that, no problems, no matter how big files I download, move, extract, or compress. I've compressed whole ED images to lzma (and de-compressed them) on device, being able to do other things on it without major slowdowns - from browsing, to talking via phone.

IIRC you have tried my settings without good results and it puzzles me. But, I'm absolutely sure that correct setting have potential to fix such instabilities, as those are clearly results of so-called "swap hell" - maybe some devices need other settings (could eMMC chips be different between production series?)? Or maybe fact that my swap on SD is 2GB in size have something to do with it, too?

/Estel

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Same issue here, device is frozen (albeit if you touch it, it's hot as hell:P) when downloading not-so-large sets of tiles (it happened few days ago when downloading tiles close to a route ~50km long, the overall download size was 60-90 mb, can't remember exactly now). I have swap on SD (was downloading tiles to eMMC so no read-write conflict) and the device doesn't reboot when doing heavy stuff with ED. Estel, do you also seem to have thumb? I'm on cssu stable on this device. I'll have to download another ~50km long route next week, I'll reswap (using your ereswap tool btw) before using modrana, then download tiles and use ereswap again (maybe modrana is using so much ram that it gets swapped to hell - then I should get the message that we are >9k over swap borderline and reswapping is needed), I'll post results then (although I doubt that 80mb of tiles could fill my 768 swap completely more than once, but you can never be sure unless you check;)).

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Yes, thumb. As for your case - I suspect that the problem is with large number of small files, more than a size of those files. Swap-related settings may be tuned for effective "burst" handling of things (which tends to "froze" device, though", or for handling everything in small chunks - little slower, but is more multitasking-friendly (watchdog is a kind of additional task too, mind you).

Also, CPU power may have something to do with it, too - I'm using 900 mhz as max, "since always". Your description about hot device seems to indicate that CPU is very busy handling I/O, which is strange - in all cases I've described (packing, unpacking, big files or many small files) my CPU is quite busy, but not extremely (nothing like 100% usage). Maybe you or pichlo are limiting speed lower than 900 mhz, and it gets choked at 100%?

/Estel

// edit

I still doesn't feel right that we're hijacking ModRana thread for this (even if it is remotely related to ModRana, i.e. to batch files handling).

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Different SD cards with different write speeds, perhaps?

Still, I don't understand why swp should play any role. Things are either in the RAM or in the swap. They should not be switching bewteen the two for hgih priority foreground processes.

Oh, I've just noticed: yes, my CPU ws also oveclocked to 900 MHz. To be honest, I assumed that that was the cause of the overheating so I reduced it back to 600 MHz but don't remember what the effect was since I no longer do big batch downloads on the device itself.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

To smash in some more offtopic (not related to modrana ;)):
I am using swap on SD (two times 2 GB) and using fmg/Estel's settings and still these unresponsiveness/reboots sometimes occur on heavy/big file transactions.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Yep, Modrana kills my device every time if I leave it running. Even just leaving it running whilst I'm walking around in a city and not batch downloading tiles. I've had to pull the battery twice and now only open it, find what I want, close it and lock the phone again. Which is pretty inconvenient.

Mappero and all the other tools I've used haven't had the same resource-hogging issue, but I've actually grown to like modRana nonetheless - especially since Mappero's routing option stopped working (presumably Google changed something on their side).

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

MartinK: Can mapnik (on a Linux PC) be used to generate tile map from osb to be copied onto N900? How? Thanks

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Are any online services are now available?
There was the ability to track/find logged in friends via TangoGPS service but that service is defunct and I do not see any options in the current UI.

Re: [Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
 

Today I had to download 20 mb of tiles, and I did this result. The steps (and results) follow:

1. launched ereswap, reswapping was performed
2. launched ereswap once again, noted the value of what was left, let's call it "X" (it was almost 500 mb)
3. launched modrana, waited for it to get gps fix and load tiles around my current position
4. launched ereswap again - the "left" value shrinked by 60mb - which means starting modrana uses 60mb of swap
5. entered route (address to address), searched it via google and started navigation, chosen option to download tiles around my current route - it was ~15k tiles, summing up to ~20mb, began downloading, stopped after 1/3
6. launched ereswap - the "left" value shrinked by 30mb while downloading <7mb of tiles (but I guess it could be also caused by the routing start)
7. chosen option to download tiels around my current route again - ~10k tiles left, suming up to ~13mb, paused at half (so that was again 1/3 of whole batch)
8. launched ereswap - while downloading <7mb of tiles this time "left" value shrinked by almost 15mb
9. downloaded the rest of tiles, launched ereswap and noted the value - 10-15 mb this time
10. closed modrana

Please note that modRana and xterm were only applications running, no incoming calls, no sms messages, nothing more. The tiles were downloaded via wifi, kernel-power 52, no bleeding edge drivers. I guess the only thing using swap in large chunks was modRana then. Someone should repeat my tests to be sure, but my experience is that modRana swap usage during tile download is more or less 2x size of downloaded tiles (I'm ignoring the first 1/3 batch here, as the routing start could also take ram/swap and interfere with the measurments). In my opinion, that shouldn't make the phone freeze, so the bottleneck must be something else.

edit: I trust the ereswap used swap measurement method is correct, I haven't analysed the code (just pointing that out, as it could also have influence on the result and its credibility).

edit2: I used N900's stock swap configration for this test (e.g. /proc/sys/vm/swappiness set to "100").