Iphone 3G slow after update to IOS4

This is absolutely ridiculous, the additions to the 3G handset are consolidation of email, a zoom to the camera and folders on the homepage....so why the ** has the handset slowed to snails pace??!
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Exactly.
Guess ill live without combined email inbox, useless digital zoom & folders.
For me, just not worth my phone slowing down to crawling pace. Not to mention the insane battery draining & gps problems.

Feel so glad I managed to revert back to 3.1.3

Message was edited by: iWUB

I have a theory about what's going on here.

When I first got my iPhone 3G, it was very snappy. Then I loaded it almost full with music and video, and it slowed to a crawl. It's never been the same since. Removing the media didn't help much, and even a full system restore didn't help any further.

As you know the iPhone 3G has only 128MB of DRAM. When that's not enough, like any modern OS, it swaps pages to "disk", that disk being the flash drive (16GB in my case).

My theory is that with so little free space, the wear leveling was confined to a small space, the logical to physical sector mapping got fragmented, and as a result, write performance got very poor. Removing the media helped because it allowed the wear-leveling algorithm to use more of the disk when writing to swap, but nevertheless it continued to get more and more fragmented over time. Restoring to factory settings doesn't help because the logical/physical mapping is managed in the drive, and that isn't reset when you restore the device.

With iOS4, the pressure to swap pages to/from disk is even greater, causing even greater and accumulating fragmented disk blocks. The result is very poor write performance that gets progressively poorer.

The fact is, the iPhone 3G just doesn't have enough DRAM for the new OS. And Apple has failed to do something really fundamental to help with this, which is to do background defragmentation of the solid-state drive.

The reason that newer devices with 256MB+ of DRAM don't have this problem is because swap pressure is dramatically reduced. Regular app performance isn't affected so much because reads are still fast, although even they should notice gradual slow-down of apps that do a lot of writing to the drive (which fortunately doesn't happen all that much).

to mxm168,
I spent 17 years working on windows software and then I moved to Mac, well what has happened on my IPhone 3G with IOS 4 was solved with a double "hard reset" nothing compared with hundreds of fatal errors, service packs, software crashes and ctrl-alt-del.
Double reboot, "it simply works!"

Since when is managing free memory overhead the role of the user? That by definition is an OS function.

Secondly, some posters have mentioned that they have taken files off their phones to see if that will speed things up. Files on your phones like music or photos etc have nothing to do with the random access memory RAM that is being overwhelmed objectively, as a matter of fact, by iOS4 on the 3G. The phones are all slower because they all at least have an insufficient amount of RAM for iOS4.

Thirdly, if I have to download the upgrade, do a system restore x 3 to the square root of 17 times, then do 13 hard resets, plus boil my phone in chicken blood so that it will upgrade, I'm not sure how that functions as a successful deployment of a new OS of any kind. This situation suggests 1) that the 3G was not tested sufficiently with iOS4 or 2) that Apple did test the 3G, saw that it could not sufficiently run iOS4 and deployed it anyway ostensibly to force 3G users to purchase a 4G by crippling their 3G phones. In either case, shame on Apple, who has encroached upon the trust of its users in this situation.

Message was edited by: Will Nielsen

adriankemp wrote:
The key seems to be to setup your phone as a new phone. I did a restore and didn't choose new phone first and had the same problem. Second time I set up as a new phone and it's snappy again (at least, as good as ever)

@adriankemp,
Could you explain exactly how you went about setting it up as a new phone the second time. Didn't you then lose all your content (your music, your mail accounts, your bookmarks, your wifi settings, and every other bit of content??).

Thanks

Since people report this problem "coming back" after awhile, I'd like to re-iterate, now after two full days of use with no reboots, that the AndrewsTech discovery of closing all Safari tabs, does seem to continue keeping the iOS4 on 3G performance well within the realm of reasonable.

Thanks again to the sleuthing of AndrewsTech.

I'm by no means an iPhone hardware firmware guru, but using a 'free memory' app on my iPhone, after doing a reset/restore, which did help, I'm sitting at 47 MB free, 3G running iOS4. It will be interesting to monitor it over the next few days

This may or may not be the solution but take a look at this page from appletoolbox
http://appletoolbox.com/2010/06/iphone-3g-slow-after-ios-4-0-update/

My personal experience was that the "hard reset" didn't work. Haven't tried the "restore" because I haven't backed up my files yet.
But after going to Safari and closing all the unused windows (had two open) along with deleting Opera. The phone appears to be more responsive.

Give it a try and let us know the feed back.

I hear yalls pain!!!! I took mine to Apple today and they said it caused corrupt files. They did something to it and now its back to normal with the 4.0! It was soooooo slow I hated it and caused me to curse out Apple daily. However problem had been corrected! 🙂

Probelms here too: my 3G has been totally bogged down since installing iOS 4. Apps take 2 or 3 times to load without crashing, and twice the phone has simply rebooted itself spontaneously. There doesn’t seem to be enough RAM to do simple things like play the iPod while playing a word game—things that used to be OK. Apple should not have released iOS 4 for this device. The device simply cannot handle it reliably.

Wiping and restoring MIGHT help, maybe, but it’s an unacceptable experiment: it’s a 10-11 hour process (I have 14GB of data) and the iPhone restore procedure has never been reliable. So you might lose everything (I did once before). Waiting 11 hours with no phone is unacceptable since I’m a freelancer, but waiting 11 hours for a restore that MIGHT help, or MIGHT wipe out all my data, is even more out of the question.

I like the folders. But I liked it even more when I actually had enough memory to run apps....

try this.
hold power button and home button at the same time until phone reboots. ignore the power off prompt with slide bar and keep holding. let phone start up normally. then repeat this process again. after that iphone 4.0 on 3g was performing normally and even seems faster. it worked for me and hopefully it will work for you.

well, ive had this for a week now on my 3G , tried numerous hard resets (press power putton & home button, keep pressed until it switches off & comers back on) did no good, & tried a restore (I was hoping it would restore to 3.1.3 but after the restore, it was just the same except I lost everything in my calander)

I think I'll just have to live with the massive amounts of time it takes to start anything now. unless they release a fix for this I wont by another apple product & I have told loads of people about this problem too, im not recommending them.
maybe ill get an android phone or the like, theres a lot of good similar phones out there now & better priced now.
Apple really need to stop ignoring there customers.

a double re-boot has sorted the problem for many people, as mentioned by some in this & other threads :

press power button and home button at the same time, hold until 'phone reboots (ignore the power-off prompt slide bar, keep holding) ... let 'phone start-up normally (Apple logo) ... when all done, do it again, repeat this process ...

Christopher John Hunter wrote:
not sure we're all using the same terminology - reboot (*) & restore (**) & reset ( *) are all different ...

we found double reboot ( **), which takes under a minute, fixed our's (3G with iOS4) pretty OK ...

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(*) reboot is what can be done at any time on the iPhone by pressing Home & Power buttons simultaneously ...

(**) restore is what can be done from the iTunes / Devices / (name of iPhone) / Summary screen when the iPhone is connected to iTunes ...

( *) reset is what can be done on th eiPhone from the Settings / General / Reset screen ...

( **) double reboot = press power button and home button at the same time, hold until 'phone reboots (ignore the power-off prompt slide bar, keep holding) ... let 'phone start-up normally (Apple logo) ... when it's all done & ready for action, immediately do it again - ie: repeat this process (don't be tempted to do anything in-between) ...

I tried all of those but none of them really fixed this slowness with my wife's 3G after the upgrade to iOS4. She's still unhappy.

I know for a fact that an occasional "restore" can slightly improve the phone's overall performance depending on how much the contents of your phone got fragmented over the time, however, I didn't see anything more than that with iOS4.