iPhone unusably slow when nearly full, free some space, it's fine.

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20 points

iPhone unusably slow when nearly full, free some space, it's fine.

I've been having problems with my iPhone being almost unusably slow for months now. Input would often take between 2 and 3 seconds to register but would someimtes take 5 to 10 seconds. Reboots would help, but only maybe for a few minutes. I even tried doing a full restore. That had the effect of making the phone snappier for maybe a day before it turned back into a snail. I just installed the 3.0 update, only to find that it didn't really help much.

I did some googling around, and I found a clue. Someone else was complaining about slowness and mentioned that when they freed up some storage space on the phone, it got fast again. That was similar to me, where I had so many songs and movies that I had only a little over 2GB free. I unselected several movies, resynced, and rebooted. My iPhone has been fast and responsive for the past several hours.

Nealy full storage seems like a really stupid reason for the phone to be slow. What's going on here?

iPhone 3G, iPhone OS 3.0

Posted on Jun 17, 2009 7:58 PM

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Answer 1

Atticaz

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Jun 17, 2009 8:09 PM in response to theosib

Desktop and laptop computers do the same thing. It's just not as bad because desktops and laptops have a different source of memory other than the storage drive(s). I believe the Phone's 8,16 or 32GB's is for memory and storage. Thus, less space means less memory to use for tasks.

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Answer 2

theosib Author

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Jun 17, 2009 8:33 PM in response to Atticaz

My iPhone's 16GB is flash memory. It's equivalent to a computer's hard disk, except it's solid state. The iPhone also has 256 megabytes of dynamic RAM ("main memory"). They're two quite distinct things, just as they are in any computer.

So, to follow your analogy, we'd have to understand why a desktop computer's user interface suddenly got slow when the hard disk was filled to over 85% capacity.

The only thing I can think of is that the 256 megs of DRAM aren't enough, and the iPhone starts "swapping out to disk". Now we're getting into territory that I'm not so familiar with, involving SSD write fragmentation, wear leveling, and other stuff.

If I'm right, though, it would imply that the iPhone has quite poor memory management.

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Answer 3

theosib Author

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20 points

Jun 17, 2009 8:39 PM in response to theosib

Oops. Correction. The iPhone 3G has only 128 megabytes of DRAM.

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