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debernardis's Avatar
Posts: 2,142 | Thanked: 2,054 times | Joined on Dec 2006 @ Sicily
#37
@f2thak: sorry mate. Hope you have the flasher utility at hand, or you had backupmenu to restore the pristine state. Might be that when turning it off, it hadn't written everything on flash, due to the changes in the way read and write get managed? So, maybe it's better to issue a sync before turning off?

@Frank Banul: reboot is not needed, the parameter changes are made on-the-fly during the install of the script that makes them also applied at boot time. And, they are reverted at uninstall time, when that script gets erased.

@kennibal: yes, and if you read Simon's explanation of those params, you'll find that there is one that lets silently crash the latest program you start if it elicits an out-of-memory condition, instead of getting rid of one or more background processes. It's the price to pay for the fluidity. If you try again maybe it will start correctly after a cleanup of memory.

Concerning this issue, I want to implement the small memory-freeing command that Simon describes in his blog post, saying he runs it as a cron job.

Code:
I run a cronjob that drops buffer cache containing pagecache, dentries and inodes, to clear out unused dirty pages (sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches).
This might take some time and resources to run, since there's a sync command which writes down to the flash memory.
Given that we haven't cron by default on our devices, and I don't know how to mess with the alarmd daemon (and I'm not sure I'll ever do), I would then add an icon to run the command and free memory when the user likes to, i.e. when the device isn't going to do critical things like answering a call or shooting a video.

What do you think? Button or alarmd?
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