How to improve the N900 performance?
 

Any clues on how to make the system run smoother and with less lags?
For example, it drives me nuts that I ALWAYS miss a call while browsing the web or watching a movie on the device. The system fails to show the phone app to answer the call in time-in addition it lags, "stutters" until some time after the incoming call is over... What is even more the music playback "stutters" when I for example browse photos in the same time or launch other apps :(
I find the device to be less and less lively with time...
Is it just me or is this normal? Any solution to this problem?

Cheers, Ralph

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

I daily switch this monster off and take battery out for a while and boot up. For me it makes this little snappier.

.edit
What Firmware you have?

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

The latest one - 1.1, everything up-to-date

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

Having the same issue here, kind of annoying, especially that music stutters sometimes when doing other things, audio playback should have higher priority.

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

This is disappointing. I just went to one of my company's main public-facing webservers which happens to have apache (known to spawn off lots of PIDs) and also MySQL running on it.
Web server number of PIDS: 104
My N900 at the moment: 164

Why is the N900 running so many apps/daemons/etc. More than a corporate webserver?

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

pagesix1536, Probably because it has got radio chip, bluetooth chip, speakers, audio, fm-transmitter, battery/charge control, touchscreen.....etc.

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

I now have problem even with connecting the internal memory to the PC. It says its in use so it cant connect. And thats even freshly after reboot...

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

I do reboot every night or every days. On my Mac I have this app called Onyx that clears caches and runs cleaning scripts. Anything like that for the N900?

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

Did you boot with usb connected?

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

No wonder Nokia insists on Symbian. Maemo is cool but not ready. The audio stutter is such a disgrace. Even non smartphones with much less processing power perform better. pulseaudio is a cpu hog. I believe the lag is due to the massive swap file.

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

Nope, rebooted and then connected. I mean I have never had that problem before

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

And I believe it's because of the moon phase and the sun spots!

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

164? On my desktop, the highest PID after 50mins of surfing and some programming is 6700.

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

I do not know what happened there but ain't no normal. And how about speed? is is more responsive?

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

Disk thrashing is no good for performance. The more you commit to swap, the harder the cpu has to work because it has to swap from disk to real memory hence the terrible lag. The RAM to Swap ratio of the N900 is a joke - 256 : 768.

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

I had this problem a while back. It seems tracker was indexing in the background and was "using" the drive. After a few minutes I tried again and it worked. I blame tracker because top in an xterm showed it was consuming resources, and the phone was doing nearly nothing else.

I can understand stutter and delayed ring through when doing intensive stuff like movie playback. But MP3 playback shouldn't be as intense, and simple things like tracker shouldn't be able to make playback stutter. :P

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

Does rootfs free space affect the performance?

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

Maybe. How much you have free space?

Btw. check in x terminal with command:
top
that there is no processes with high cpu and low io

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

88% used up with repositories enabled. Disabling them does not make any effect on performance (8% of rootfs space is freed though)

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

It should be enough. I would be worried if it drops below 10 mb.

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

What about the phone registry? I think it makes a difference in symbian (the time the history of calls is kept). Does it affect the performance on maemo as well?

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

To begin with, is there any thrashing? Currently I have 148/239 MB of RAM used, with additional 114 MB sitting in swap. The high usage of swap is not caused by the lack of free RAM, but because the unused memory pages were dumped to disk to free up the space for actually useful data.

You can always also disable the swap if you're so concerned about it.

I/O wait is not CPU usage.

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

I was also surprised when I saw all this processes in htop but then I saw also that only one process was actually active. So most of the processes which you see there dont use resources except a bit RAM.

If you dont like it then disable the ones which you dont need, but I dont see any process which is "useless" there.

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

Vote for bug 7147 - https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7147

This bug describes that after playing video the video rendering daemon (mafw-gst-renderer) grows in memory uncontrollable and N900 kernel spends some physical time then it swaps mafw-gst-renderer out (see comment #11). That takes 10-15secs and you miss a call.

EDIT: vote for bug for faster resolution of it. Now it is still in UNCONFIRMED state.

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

Reflash EMMC(backup all the stuff you wanna keep)
then flash the update(51-1.002)

i did that today after too many symlinks. works like a charm:D

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

Sure, Ive just voted. So you say the only way to actually speed up the n900 is to freshly reflash it later meaning reinstalling all the apps etc...? That would be a nightmare as n900 takes hours to actually install even a single app, or even to update one :(

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

WTF are you connecting over, a piece of string? The N900 takes less than a minute for most apps here.

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

I get less than a minute even when I need to download about 200kB via gprs....

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

Ok, I might have exaggerated a bit, but as Ive moved from N95 the installation of a 20kb for example was a lot faster (im not taking the download time into consideration) so I feel the difference

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

One thing that fustraights me so much about some N900 users... Its NOT a SYMBIAN based phone, or an iPhone with iPhoneMacOS, it is an internet tablet running LINUX and should be treated as such.

The more stuff you put on a linux or windows desktop application wise, the more it will slow down.

Symbian applications are not as complex as a Maemo linux application, less lines of code etc.

If you want a superfast no lag device with no issues and perfect firmware from day dot, don't buy an N900.

Performance will improve over time as code is cleaned up and bugs are ironed out in future releases.

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

the thread starter wants a direct answer. and this will be helpful to all of us.

and not complaints about the performance and not attacks and reminders about not buying it etc. and not facts about how device is slowing down as you put in more and more applications.

ok I'll give you a direct answer that I know:

-overclock your N900
-install transitioncontrol (faster transitions improves performance)
-install softwares already available that will make your life easier like:
>shortcutd (lets you set camera button to a function eg. call)
>simple brightness app
>quick launch
>call notify
>catorise
>cpufrequi
>headphone daemon
>live focus (improves the performance and functionality of your camera)
>mplayer + SIB (play unplayable video format, really amazing)

I might not have mentioned everything the rest can add up!

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

I also read somewhere that the index trackerd can sometimes get a bit stuck, for example when encounters certain file extensions... possible something to do with file association and particular issues around codec.

In fact this index tracker is one of the processes that is always around, this by itself comsumes energy, does anyone know what would happen if it was turned off?

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

Just gotta point this out: Most transitions tweaks don't actually change performance at all - what they change is how quickly certain animations play, which, with the right combinations of visual effect, they make people feel things are going faster/better/smoother when they are actually the same.

What performance gains you get is setting rotation animations down to all zeroes, for instance (which isn't truly performance, but it cuts the time to rotate down... by, like, a barely perceptible difference from the transitions I was using beforehandc), and/or dropping the amount of iterations of "blur" on background stuff when a menu pops up, etc (which may or may not actually noticeably change anything performance wise, and unless you're pushing your device or catch it during heavy RAM/swap IO it shouldn't change anything, although I have noticed a slight purely psychological effect in that switching from more blur to significantly less or none [especially none] gives a perceived UI 'crispness' that seems to in turn give the illusion of graphical performance being better.)

Re: How to improve the N900 performance?
 

I know that the thread is old (being most of a year ago is tricky for the ones that read just the start of the date :) but in this topic got amazed how much improved things with time.

Got my phone more or less by the time this thread started, and did a lot of tests, installs, configurations and so on with time, so was getting a bit of garbage all around.

Last week decided for a mostly fresh restart, and reflashed, applied pr1.3, powerkernel, cssu, n900tuneup and swappolube (but not restored configurations, in fact deleted most "." dirs in user home), and got amazed how fast it felt compared with my memories of the start, and how much i can abuse battery, seeing that it can last more than a day even with that.

So my answer for the original question is the community, participating, keeping in touch with what is going here, testing things and helping if you can. You will be surprised with how much better device you will have thanks to that.