@catacalysm:

Thanks for all the help. I certainly don't want to ask you to go too far on your phone but I'm curious: do you never feel like it gets a bit slow. At the end of my second day on this experiment I am noticing a slight slowdown. Its nothing unmanageable but I think its slower than this morning but its hard to be sure. If it doesn't become blatant than it might just be in my head.

But to compare more concretely can you please try some simple stuff. launch the media player and start an mp3. Pause it and launch a browser window. Then try connecting to a network. While its connecting switch to the music player and start it playing then switch immediately to a browser window and try to access a site (or reload an old one). When I did something like this music playback stuttered noticeably.

Even while typing this I got an sms and when I switched to check it music play stuttered a bit. Do you get this or do I have an issue.

masq, tis certainly not a problem, always willing to help!

Day three report, 73 hours and 46 minutes to be precise,
The device was running very well towards the middle of the day, running 12+ apps throughout and constantly using it, bluetoothing, youtubing, emailing etc.
Unfortunately, i cannot say i have not noticed a minor slowdown, whilst eating and tuning into youtube watching mock the week, i had a siezure on the device (Granted there was a fair amount of apps still open) i believed the device was going to actually "BSOD" on me at that point haha, but then after 10 seconds or so i saw the incoming phone call come up "Phew".

For the last hour i have been watching flash videos on youtube with no problem whilst i mess with term-x, however i have noticed now hildon status, desktop and xorg - logfile are using more CPU then normally, Xorg, im not too sure but i think its possible changed since i last looked at it? the directory/shortcut? now is showing -logfile /tmp/Xorg.0.01o on the end of it,

Also since hildon is spiking more, i believe this could also be down to me charging with animation on the battery icon. My initial theory was correct, hildon then dropped down to 0.7%, next i've seen xorg go from roughly 6-7% down to 1.9/2.2 to 2.9/3.1 (interesting, ill keep an eye on that.) i will plug it back in now and begin the tests. (CPU rose after plugging it in, enter high refresh rate on the battery icon?) Curios, if anyones using modified battery icons, can i have a comparison of sizes due to testing purposes? If people are having hildon issues, this could potentially be down to higher size icons.

Unfortunately, my wifi connects 1-2 seconds regardless of the setting im on, but i will try all of what you said + an orientation change when browsing, i will look for a heavy load site too.

Ok good news, Wifi connect + youtube loading up + video playing + screen orientation resulted in zero stutter or any form of delay on the phone itself, the only delay noticed was the one from the browser rendering in portrait mode (It notably renders more in this format since youtube is quite linear i find.) but no delay on the phone itself.

I can also begin texting people if you like (i know they'l reply).

Im going to bombard the phone with apps again to see if its up for running smoothly with a large load.

Hope this helps,
Cata.

Thanks again for the update. I appreciate all the help.

I think I'm noticing a slowdown but didn't really get a chance to use my phone this morning and it might have just been a "wakeup" slowdown. Since yesterday however I've noticed that it often takes two clicks on the power button to get the slider screen when I want to wake it up. Ever get that?

I also had a crash in the web-browser (while opening a PDF). Incidentally I have my browser cache set to 40 mb since someone said that would speed things up. I haven't tried clearing my cache - does the "clear private data" button also clear usernames and passwords or just cache?

When you say you had 12 apps running, do you mean browser windows or even more stuff? Later today I'll try pushing the phone a bit to see if it slows down but the network near my office is not 3g so its hard to put the phone through its paces.

I started to get annoying slowdowns a lot too, and noticed that this happens when the used swap memory gets over 150mb or so, and N900 gets more or less uselessly slow when it hits over 200mb mark. Is there any other way to "reset" swap than reboot? After reboot everything works fine again, until the swap gets up again. So far I have been able to get at max 2 days uptime before the device swaps too much. Uninstalling/disabling widgets doesn't seem to affect this all that much.

Yeah i think we all get wake up slowdowns, today is day 4 but i will report exactly when the 96 hour is reached, with regards to the double flick of the switch when in slider mode, thats a bug, fortunately not a slow down or an issue, when the screen decides to turn itself off, it doesnt lock itself in a sense, just powers down the screen (Maybe due to being in power saver mode?) but yeah if you hit a key the device will power right up straight away, (Although it may be worth filing a bug report.)

With regards to the PDF, i haven't tried this because i believe buffering the PDF files (sometimes rather large) could have a significant hit on performance when you load it up (so i normally save to device.) i will scour round for a large PDF and try load it up with the standard buffer settings. Private data, im not so sure about however it would make sense if it was all your passwords etc that are stored (I generally have used the remember me feature quite alot.)

Pushing the phone, i mean say, OVI maps, media player, camera, bounce, several internet pages fully rendered and ready to go, pidgin msn client, texting, my phone constantly has a swap file usage of 150 (its been on for four days so can't expect less then that) and ram is constantly at 50-60% because the swap file seems to take care of excess things, you can set the swap file settings around by the way, you can set it to transfer less if your performance is deteriorating too fast, it should mean that more ram is being used (picked this up from another thread though, not a clue how to change it?).

Today the device is feeling snappy (prehaps a good wake up) in the middle of the night at around 1:30 am i found myself with a bombardment of phone calls as well as texts (dont ask,) that was running circles around them tasks, and this morning it seems that it hasn't changed, the device seems to be functioning really well.

Ok so looking at terminal x top today, im averaging a nice1.1 to 3.3 on xorg, lathough hildon status menu seems a bit more active, and osso-xterm, these are both using 0.7, averaging a 3.1 to 3.7 CPU load today, slightly higher but i imagine that it will shrink throughout the day as the device is used.

Soulfarmer, i believe the swap memory is just like page filing, say if your running a windows PC, and you have your machine set up for heavy page filing, your read and write speed will degrade the further it fulls up (ios loads etc) i believe this is the exact same case.

I hope this helps on our journey to speed things up. ^^

I second most irresponsive/slowdown issues reported here.

I've increased the call forwarding timer to 30 secs, but still miss calls due to the phone app isn't fast enough to come up within these 30 secs. After a reboot, the phone is fast for a couple of minutes (never more than 10 mins), and then becomes slow again. I barely run the device more than a day between rebooting.

The irresponsiveness is not about a few secs. Sometimes it takes minutes to start an app, or to get the task switcher to switch tasks. And it also greatly increases the risk of mis-taping, making it take yet another minute to get to the right place. It's not only apps getting irresponsive, but also the input interface. The vibration comes seconds after the tap, and sometimes not at all. Going from "swipe to unlock" to actually making a call is a multi-try two minute procedure.

Looking at resources, the mem usage is at about 75%. Shouldn't be a problem.

Sometimes the CPU is hogged by some app or hildon module, but most of the times the CPU is within the 25-40% range. Shouldn't be a problem (except when hogged).

Most of the times, the most CPU eating apps are at 2-10% of the CPU. Shouldn't be a problem.

But even though the CPU reports less than 40% usage (both in conky and top), the load is between 3 and 15, making the phone VERY sluggish. How can the load be that high when the CPU is not maxed out?

I've got devel enabled, and run a bunch of apps, but never more than 3-4 apps at the same time. Running 15 apps simultaneously (as some in this thread) is impossible. The interface wouldn't be responsive enough to start the last 10 of them.

I've got some widgets configured, but since killing hildon-desktop (or was it hildon-home or hildon-desktop?) disables all non-Nokia widgets, I've grown tired of adding them again, so now I've only got the calendar widget enabled.

I don't listen to music, so that's not the cause. I seldom browse the web (since I'm always at a computer), so that's not the cause (even though starting the browser adds a lot to the slugginess).

Going offline (availability) makes it better, but I would still not call it fast. Going offline (internet) makes is even better, but still not "fast" (we're talking 5-10 seconds to do something, in stead of minutes)

Might be a cause: 12 different IM services configured and ~2500 contacts (merging a contact takes up to 3-4 minutes waiting for the merge candidates list to show up).

Anyway, I still love the little thingy. I'd rather have a slow irresponsive ugly but feature-packed rootable device, then a beautiful lightning fast bling device with thousands of silly dumbapps but without a native prompt.

Hey Pallem, shame to hear of your sluggishness, but im happy to hear your coping with the device, When i initially got my device, i didnt do anything, just got wifi up and running immediately and updated all the latest firmware, everything is running amazingly.

Now what i haven't done is even tried the devel apps or anything from the xtras repos, but from what i understanding, using things from these two seems to install into the Root directory, which could cause potential slowdowns, for this there are ways of getting around it,apt commands after taking control of root etc, but i dont know too much about that .... yet.

There is a video of someone running 32 things on the N900 on youtube, thats when the device begins to stutter...lol! but 12-16 should run fine (i posted a screenie on one of the earlier pages, thats how i use my device every day.)

I had one unstable complete spike yesterday, this was unplugging USB without unplugging it from the phone itself, the device was 100% cpu full time, but still usable (Handshake gone wrong?) lol, after i unplugged from the phone itself things settled down!

Im trying to understand how CPU usage works, we have clocks 250mhz, 500 and 600mhz and the CPU reports percentage, i dont know if this is of total? or of current frequency.

I could understand your device going a bit slow with all them contacts with the IM service though haha, thats alot of pressure!

Currently my root is sat happily on 60mb, its gone up by 20 since yesterday, i believe the phone seens to be distrobuting and moving files nicely.

My root FS has 15 megs available. I've had it at 50 megs available, with no difference in behaviour as I remember. Have neither noticed any differences with CPU running at 250, 500 or 600 MHz.

I know devel stuff is probably not making my little mobile computer any faster, so that's why I'm not ranting about it, but rather reporting and hoping someone stumbles upon a solution.

/P

hmm intersting, i do agree therea got to be something were overlooking here im still going to defrag it from my pc lol, also apparently the n900 indexes some things but i dont know how far that extends, after my two week full trial i will flood all 27 gigs with music and pictures to see how performance is.

week two im going to flood my desktop with widgets that are stable, but i wont try xtras repos since we have no hard reset lol.

I fully understand what the swap means, but what I don't understand is why the swap usage seems to just get bigger and not smaller at all. I would like to find out how to reduce the use of the swap or at least how to "purge" it somehow instead of booting the device every few days.