Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

1 year ago i was bored how slow my phone was. Then i started doing a research how the phone could be faster. Today i find it very fast. I have sailed through all the battery patches and stuff. But these things i have found best. Check out how amazing fast N900 is. Video is pretty old, i dont have cssu installed in it. Its even faster now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCQaxqqRzm4

Apply all steps below to get n900 smooth:

1. Reflash new maemo with latest PR + CSSU and if possible reflash emmc too. It makes a big difference if you clean ALL.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU

- Download Cssu tuner + cssu features, in features put animations to 0. In Cssu features apply blurless meego style.

2. programs to install:

-theme customizer, apply fast animations

-swappolube, with proposed settings, save and store

-tweakflash, Use suggested flash 10 or froyo flash

-tracker cfg (Enable “LowMemoryMode”, Set Indexing Throttle to 10) save and restart tracker, rebuild if wanted

3. overclock. Use latest powerkernel:
- 24/7 850-1100mhz. (i suggest to use default voltages) Check jakimans oc guide http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=774

4. Remove touchscreen vibration and system sounds from settings

-Disable autoupdate (when you connect to internet this is why your phone lags) type to xterm (you dont have to root):

gconftool -s --type int /apps/hildon/update-notifier/check_interval 1440000

5. TIPS

-REMOVE all unnecessary widgets and shortcuts
-REMOVE unnecessary desktops. Im just using 2 desktops and only 2 widgets
-DO NOT install apps you dont really need.
-Clear your sms + call history if really not needed.

6. After all five steps remember to reboot.

Nothing special, but this way my n900 feels fastest.
____________________________________

Online help: Join the maemo IRC channel on freenode #maemo
http://wiki.maemo.org/IRC

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

I tried the hardware accelerated transitions, the transitions are better but there is always that jerky transition. Its extremely annoying.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

I am overclocked to 1150mhz and using swappolube and yet my device freezes up completely several times a day. This is my second N900 and this one is less than a week old. Yet everyone else seems to have super smooth N900s. Don't know whether I am just unlucky with N900s, whether others are pretending their devices are flawless or whether I have something I install that kills the device. Whatever it is this is the most frustrating device I have ever owned. My favourite phone ever due to all the customisations but still the most frustrating ever.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

I'd put money on the problem with the freezing 3 times a day is related to overclocking.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

+1. Back off to stock 600 or at least maybe 750-800, stay away from low voltage profiles like ulv or starving and run it for a while to see if it stabilizes.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

Patient's young jedi :)

OC isn't always a good thing, in moderation it can be. As crash said knock it back a bit and see what happens. At 1.1k mhz your flogging the bugger to death.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

your mileage may vary. Sigh...I remember that I installed my first linux distro about 2001, since then I have ranted on different forums that wtf is this jerkyness and stuttering with x windows.Normally people just wonder whattahell I'm talking about but there is growing group of people who see difference between ios and windows rendering performance compared to xorg with nvidia or ati drivers.

my point here is that it's somewhat amazing to see how differently people see e.g. 25fps vs. 50fps. to some people it's most important thing and some people (probably ones who spend most of their time in shell) do not even seem to notice or care.

sorry for offtopic and typos, too much alcohol+bored+n900 keyboard. My N900 is working pretty nicely on modified hildon components and minimal apps.

.edit
basically waiting for wayland for desktop linux so that i can fully start using it.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

im using the mine.. with swappolube.. 850 LV OC, en nothing more.. its smooth *** hell ??

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

+1, I found out OC + undervolt (specially undervolt) may really cause slowdowns.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

I have almost all the apps/settings that you listed but I OC'd mine to the obvious N900Mhz, and it's working like a charm. Try going back to 600Mhz and going slowly up from there. I didn't change the voltage because it froze my phone.

Edit: Also, my N900 battery lasts longer on 900Mhz with pr1.3 than it did on 600Mhz with pr1.2.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

My N900 has poorly written video drivers that don't accelerate the graphics layer. That sucks, and makes me hate the phone.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

i have super lag and unexpected reboot issues when using Transmission app.......

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

Overclocked?

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

Remember a couple of things: One, your system will automatically underclock to 250mhz to save battery power when it can. When the cpu load goes over 90% for a bit of time, it will bump the speed. But it takes a bit of time to do this, making transitions appear jerky.

Once you have kernel-power, you can mess with some of those settings in your (oc)clock profile file.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

Sounds more like the ******ed application manager. Set the software update check interval to next millennium.

Also get a copy of tracker-cfg and kill the stupid tracker daemons.


Edit: lol, why is re tar ded a banned word?

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

I do have something you can try. Edit your overclock profile (/home/user/.kernel/something) and set your dsp frequency to the default value (430 when processor is at 600). The dsp frequency is the number after the ','. For me, as I only use 850 MHz, it is 850:56,430.

Hope that helps, it worked for me.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

Exactly, when one connects to internet, there are several things happening and the heaviest is HAM which checks for new updates. Others are chat plugins connecting and mail check. Probably several desktop widgets also join there in the fun.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

Thanks. Always thought it was the more the merrier but guess there is only so much it can take. Will try running at 850 maximum. What are people's thoughts on minimum? Should it be like 250, 500 or the same as maximum? Have read somewhere keep a low minimum as it saves battery when screen is locked. But I have also read better to have same maximum and minimum as having a different minimum causes the device to jump around and possibly be less stable due to having to work different frequencies.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

if screen is locked it should take Omhz

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

i spend lots of time in browsing the internet. and then it goes freeze many times in a day even without oc. dont know wht to do but its very frustrating. :(

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

How much money would you put on my crashing or freezing three times a day? I'm overclocking 900 900.

Do you need an address where to send the money? Because I'm not crashing or freezing.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

When screen is locked and off, CPU goes into a sleep / idle state. (=0Mhz) (Unless you have video/music/Sygic etc running still) I've been using mine locked at 1GHz for both minimum and maximum for past few weeks. Zero issues so far and feels more responsive than 500min 1000max which I was using before.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

Just want to add my 2 cents: how your N900 performs largely depends on what is run, how it is tuned, and how you optimize the system havig unsatifactory factory settings by Nokia.

In my case the most frequent and prominent lagging happens when running several brower windows, terminal sessions, AND that wtf HAM.

Other than that,
Mine runs nicely, though not *perfectly*, contant@1GHz having 7 or 8 windows opened, including games.
IMHO lagging happens because of various factors. One simple way to catch the naughty app is by looking at the CPU & RAM usage. Conky, applets, (h)top, etc. will give you a clear view.
I am thinking of some really bad guys and what I do about them:
- HAM: n times slower than FAM. (Almost) hang up even when installing just one small app. Takes ages to refresh and installing, regardless how fast you OC and without running any other applications. It is a real piece of crap, even worse than the app manager in windows mobile.
Remedy: Use FAM, or even better and faster just apt-get (which I do 90% of the time). And like others have said. Send the update checking task to oblivion.
- Tracker: uses a lot of resources when desktop starts up.
Remedy: tracker-cfg
- Various daemons: some may install and run "secretly" without being noticed after installing certain apps.
Remedy: ps or whatever to find them out. Kill them and remove those packages if possible
- Frequency: after OC I don't think I would go back to the default setting that sucks.
Remedy: OC w/ some tuned presets, e.g. those from Queen Beecon Widgets
- Swapping
Remedy use Swappolube or BoostN900.
- Crowded and slow desktops: it's an overkill to have many widgets working busily (updating, etc.) on the desktops.
Remedy: Use only those widgets you really need, use less fancy decorations, use Matan's modified-hildon-desktop, etc..

This phone, just like all others, inevitably leaves something to be desired.
The nicest thing about this phone is we have very frequent releases of new fixes, new kernels, new modified apps and even new alternative OSs and booting methods.
The wiki has MANY more tricks and goodies to improve the user experience, e.g.
http://wiki.maemo.org/Customizing_Maemo
http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Joerg_rw/tools
http://wiki.maemo.org/Remapping_keyboard
etc. etc.

Last but not least, being able to run full scale distros like Debian well indicates that the phone is not crap compared to other not-so-smartphones.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

I think this phone would be a hell of a lot better if Nokia just released better-than-mediocre video drivers. VSync on the graphics layer (hildon), and graphics acceleration on the graphics layer (again, hildon) would be kinda nice - like my first generation iPod Touch for instance. I've done all of these mods countless times and they help, but performance is still mediocre. To think this used to be my linux dream phone. It's just not worth the performance trade off for the features.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

Errr yeah... it was a figure of speech. Other than that I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

I have mine OC'd @ 950 and I have never seen any lags. I have all sorts of transition mods and customizations but never has it lagged. I run IM+SIP, multiple browser windows, music, at times connected via RDesktop to work but nothing more. It works flawlessly. I'd say you have to adapt to your device.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

Seriously, I would pay $100 for an extra 256MB of RAM if there was such an hardware upgrade option. I reckon that would make a big difference to the overall feel. eg. when having multiple MicroB windows open etc.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

If it were that simple I'm sure it would have been done already. I hear the PowerVR drivers are generally terrible anyway.

Again, if it were that simple it would have been done. Compositing is a huge pain and, IIRC, vsync is a problem even on desktop Linux.

Funny, graphics have never been a source of slowdown for me. It's almost always disk activity or heavy cpu usage by something. All of which has improved in PR1.3. That and fancy graphics were only a "nice to have" for me, or I would have bought an iPhone ;)

@geneven
All problems on overclocked devices are suspect. I'd ignore anything reported as a bug unless it was confirmed to occur at stock clock.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

Okay since yesterday evening I have deleted all my widgets apart from yellow notes applet and touch search. I have not overclocked as I have deleted my QB widgets (and can't be bothered to search for the xterm code). Since then my device has been working a million times better. Still get those horrible grid lines when scrolling in browser but at least device is usable. Unlike before when it was constantly freezing. Sure when I oveclock it will be even better.

Downside is I now have 9 bare desktops. Not much point having opportunity to have up to 9 homescreens if all you can have on them is shortcuts. Might as well have an iphone 4 in that case. Just kidding before any iphone burning folk attack me.

So how do I work out which widgets are troublesome and which are fine? Other than the rather slow process of putting them back one by one and trying the device with the new widget for a day or so.

I did not have any widgets that update from the internet so that was not the issue. I think someone said avoid python widgets but how can I tell if a widget is pyhton? Could not find that information in the widget details nor by searching (just tons of results about creating python widgets, etc).

So any tips on which widgets are safe? Presumably QBW is safe right? No matter how many you have. I had about 40 beecons on my desktops. So is calemdar home widget right? I had a clock on every desktop and 5 different ones on one desktop (for different timezones). Could that be evil?

What of the photo widgets (photo frame and photo applet)? Do not think they were problem on my device though because I deleted them and I still could not use the device.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

I have today posted an article with compilation of some of the known tweaks for the N900. Check my sig for the link! :D

btw, if there's something I didn't list but is worth mentioning, definitely let me know as I wanna know about it even for my own N900. :p

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

I don't think there really is any easy way around it. Just try it and see how it goes really. I generally check battery-eye, cpumem-applet activity and conky/top output quite often just to ensure nothing is using too much CPU or memory.

I have about 7 QBW widgets, 1 calendar home, 3 connectnow for the widgets in addition to 4 contacts and 15 bookmarks. No issues.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

This doesn't seem to be very heavy use to me. :D
Thanks for your comprehensive guide. This definitely can save tons of hours for thousands of users. Will you consider adding the content to the wiki?

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

Been there done that.
Asked this question couple of months ago:
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=149
And I have tried to ask help on memory debugging with no results.

And of course I have read the infamous bug reports and some of Nokia engineers comments to it:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8723
Where basically some of engineers rant about python but after all do not give any proper hints how to deal with this. "Remove all python applications" riiiight why not just say that flash your device and we all will be much wiser...or maybe not.

But problem I find are:
-No-one has ever made proper guide how to look for packages that depends on <package>
- There seems to be no easy way to see what plugins/widgets are leaking (or way at all). More like some kind of fck up Sherlock Holmes work have to be done with smaps and different kind of memory debug apps/scripts that are only usable from cli and really understanding how they work would take quite much of time. Leaking widget detection should be there without even having to make ANY conversations about this!

Makes me wonder!
Haven´t seen any script or guides on how to spot memory leaks in widgets used on hildon-home. Everyone seems to bee to busy on inventing something new. Current situation is that we have widgets that leak after uptime of weeks. Maybe it´s because of widget itself or just bug in hildon-home.

I tend to use only 1-2 widgets because I have found most of them troublesome after uptime of week. Hildon-home/desktop memory size keeps growing and eventually apps start stuttering. First thing where I can notice this is that when camera app starts slowing down it´s time to reboot. But currently everything runs fine because I use only Nokias own widgets.

So here is some rudimentary brainfck methods to find out dependency for packages. I would gladly see someone to make proper script from out of this:
You should run it also with packagename python.

What it does?
apt-cache rdepends python2.5
Lists ALL packages that are depended on python 2.5 installed or not installed. dpkg --status goes through that list and finally shows only packages that you have installed. I would recommend to output it to file so that you only see installed package names without package not found messages from dpkg.

.edit
Seems that there is some bash scripts but:
I will not install bash to this I want script that works out of box device. Whole point of easy find easy report is ruined if something extra needs to be done.
http://mydebian.blogdns.org/?tag=apt-cache

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

Now there speaks an expat if ever I heard one! :D

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

Im trying to get my n900 as fast as possible, is there any guide how to overclock dsp ? Still havent found how to do it. Or new programs to tweak n900 ?

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

You can try my script in the signatur. It does some vm tuning and installs a firewall and a traffic-shapping script. It makes ur internet really secure and fast. For example it disables IP-Forwarding which means that it rejects all unknown packets and it is ranking different protocols and ports, for example http-port 80 has a high ranking higher then bittorrent port 6881 which means your surfing is smoother if u do filesharing the same time.

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

by installing theme customizer and then setting it to custom fast window transition after that use titan power kernel and use ideal profile and set hildon-desktop transition by edit /etc/powervr.d/hildon-desktop.ini change the value to 1 to enable it then restart your phone you see a smooth and faster feel to ur phone hope this helps:)

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

This made things feel smoother. Thanks!

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?
 

Does this make any harm if i use joikuspot ? Or just making connection faster ?


How do i open that ini file, can u tell me xterm commands :P

Re: Make n900 smooth, is there even more ?