Today i runned 45 apps, plus 5 than my youtube video..if i can run 50 and the phone still responding, i'll post : )

Are you using default CPU clock or a OC one?

Here are three of the apps that more heavy:

-ENNA
-PSX4ALL
-EasyDebian

I managed to get to about 45-50 but couldn't count exactly because the task manager was struggling badly. I also noticed that if you leave some time after starting a few apps, the system recovers and you can start more apps.

I forgot to mention that I'm running a stock kernel so no overclock at all.

Don't be silly, this depend on apps. I can easily start hundrends and sousands of apps and they will sleep in swap and will not use any system resources. The only thin place is task switcher, which draws them all.

i too also use less than 3 apps, though sometimes i have 4 - 5 web browser windows open at the same time. but that wont count to 7 or 8 apps

Applications which wait for an "OK" button to be pressed are not running. They are in an event loop at best, spend nothing of processor time, and are likely to be swapped out until they are activated by the Task Manager. You can easily skew videos like this showing only the nice parts -- now get them to reactivate all the apps, it will be slow to death. It's heavily biased and, as said here, do not include a "live" task manager with current, updating thumbnails of the graphic processes.

A good test for the N900 would be to run like 60 browser windows at the same time with different addresses, using a text file and a shell script loop with Phone Control to call the browser with a specific address. This is due to the nature of browsers; the code is not the heavy part, but the data, the caches, buffers, internal representation of pages, compiled javascript, running code and so on.

I really doubt any current phone would get more than, say, 30 windows with applications that are really really running. If not by speed (typical timeslice is 10 ms, 30 windows would take 300ms plus the task switching plus the live thumbnail... You get the idea), at least by memory (swap usage would slow it to the ground).

I got to 27. At which point it took >1 minute to open bejeweled. I gave up. Running 900 mhz. I think a non-live task switcher would be better. Maybe it could take a snap shot of the app when you switch out of it and then stop updating the screen for that app.

I got to 40 apps (and 41 "windows" since one of the apps was the browser which displays two windows) on the stock 600Mhz kernel, including some "heavy" programs like Open Office, Super Tux, and Angry Birds. Task switching was getting sluggish and was just usable, until I opened the 40th app, Tux Racer. That killed the task switcher.

Eventually a window opened allowing me to kill the programs not responding. After a long time (about 30 minutes) it did and everything was back to normal.

You know, you could just open many instances of a small app from the command line.

Example:

That will open 70 instances of leafpad. I had close to 30 open and the slowdown was less than any one app running in a Xephyr window. Did you know that once you open a certain number of apps, you can use kinetic scrolling in the task manager? So unfortunately you can't see all of them at once

EDIT: LOL tried opening 70 at once and got a bunch of error messages, only about 39 opened successfully. Opened one more and the desktop crashed It would probably be OK if you opened them one at a time.

Steps to do a hard test with your browser. Will not take too long and will force your N900 since each browser window typically uses resources similar to a different application (because of image data, running loops, controls, possibly javascript).

1. Get a random URL list in a text file, one by line. I've made one with 105 urls here.

2. Take the file to your N900, say, /home/user/MyDocs/urls.txt.

3. Decide how many windows you want open. Let's say, 40.

4. Make a shell loop to open one window for each address:


The command to open the window is taken from Phone control. I didn't test this, I don't want to stress my phone with unnecessary running apps, but it should work.

(OBS.: The "\" in the end of the line means the line goes on after the <enter>, it's like it was a long line. You can also use one long line beginning with "dbus" and ending with "$url" provided you remove the "\"s.)