Iphone 3GS slow after update to iOS 5

We have 2 3GS devices, 1 iPad2, 1 iPod (last generation). iPod and iPad work fine with iOS5. Both iPhones, however, became pretty much unusable with apps crashing and/or slowing down after the upgrade. Reading this thread I did the following:

1. Disabled notifications for the calendar

2. Disabled iCloud everywhere

3. Disabled sending data to Apple.

My phone is now as fast as it used to be before the update. You might want to study this thread for exact instructions. Although it fixed the problem with my phone I'm still pretty ******. Lots of my friends suffer and the majority have no idea this forum even exists. I imagine there are too many folks like us out there who are pretty angry. Apple, you should put a big banner on the front page of your website that says "sorry" and, most importantly, telling people what to do.

I was really shocked and disappointed by this upgrade. It took ages and many attempts to sync. Then the phone was very slow and many things simply did not work, or started to work and then ground to a halt.

I then read this discussion and was very depressed - so many people with the same problem - maybe I should not have upgraded.

However, after trying various things suggested here, and a lot of patience, after 24 hours it seems to be working well again.

Some points from my experience:

1) The WiFi problem I think was the killer for my phone. Things got a lot better after I hard reset the phone, the whilst it was off took down my network, watied and then brought it back up. Then, on restarting the phone the ridiculous lags seemed to go away. It was subtle because it found the network and logged on flawlessly and apps (eg App Store or Spped Test) appeared to be working, bit then everything ground to a halt. I was convinced it was the phone / OS, but I think now that some problem with the WiFi setup after upgrade was the root cause somehow consuming all the phone's resources.

2) I did turn off pretty much every noitification and deleted the iCloud account. I have turned some of these on selectively as I needed them and performance does not seem to have degraded noticeably. I have not yet re-enabled the iCloud etc.

3) When things were running particularly badly the daignostics did show an out of memory error.

4) In hindsight, I think my app / photo / music transfer problems may have in part been my problem in not having been fully syncing (because it is too slow when you have 5000 photos and 2000 songs)

5) I am not so sad to have been forced to spring clean the apps - there was a lot of never used dross that I have not replaced.

So, I am now of the opinion that there is no fundamental problem with iOS5 on 3GS, *BUT* you really don't expect to have this bad an experience with an Apple device (if I want this sort of hassle there are other choices...)

Simon.

I too have experienced similar issues - slow keyboard response, high CPU (> 90%) consumption, very poor battery life, Message/Settings would take 7 - 10 secs to open, some apps take too long to open, some crash etc., etc,..... 😠 😟 😮

As suggested by several forum users, I tried several combinations of turning OFF several SHOW PIECE features ... finally narrowed it down to CALENDAR Notification ... turn it off in ...

Settings > Notification > In Notification Center (scroll down to) > Calendar > Notification Center [OFF].

Turning this off defeats the purpose ... 2 steps forward (with iOS 5) and 4 steps backwards (Calendar alerts/notification is very important). With Calendar Notification ON, the CPU usage is over 90% ... the moment it is turned OFF, it returns to less than 10%. After this finding, I turn ON Notification during my work time and OFF while not ... not something I like, but have no other choice 😮

Well, this is my experience ... it may or may not fix for others though!

I use the app System Status to monitor the vital statistics of iPhone/iPad. Once you install System Status, you might also want to have a look at the the System Log. Open System Status > Details > System Log. Its got a wealth of information for technically inclined users. I found a line that said something like ... "Caldav notification trying to open <something> .... Tried 20 times unsuccessfully ... error ... etc,. The same thing will repeat every minute or less ... so I decided to turn Calendar Notification off.

NOTE 1: My iCloud is ON for Mail, Reminder, Bookmark, Data/Docs & Find-my-iPhone and so is sending Diagnostic Data to Apple (let them still get debug data in the hope that they will send the iOS 5.0.1 sooner). My CPU usage is between 7% - 15% and battery life is acceptable.

NOTE 2: I don't have this problem in my iPad 2 running iOS 5 🙂 no issues with Calendar Notification .... and I sync both iPhone 4 & iPad 2 with the same iTunes Windows 7 (x64) PC and I use iCloud between these 2 devices.

Cheers

Hello

I am just wondering if you could also help on my issue, when i go and type a msg or a web address etc on my iphone 3GS running ios 5, the screen and keyboard has a mind of its own, it pressing letters what im not pressing and scrolling on its own.

Do you think its a firmware problems or iphone screen?

thank you

@markie308511 Start by trying a hard reset of your iPhone. This seems to solve a number of problems.

http://www.hardreset.eu/apple_iphone_hard_reset_soft_reset_en.html

@LinuxFan Thanks for the info and the ref to System Status.

For me, the hard reboot initially seemed to resolve my worst issues, but then I found when I try to add/edit/delete a contact, event or reminder, the phone hangs for a while and then the app crashes. I've tried to Restore the phone, turned Notifications for all apps, location services and the Find My iPhone mechanism, turned off WiFi, and the CPU is still pegged.

I am trying to turn off iCloud sync for selected things, but that also fails. I've had a "Turnig Off Notes..." banner on my iPhone for about 10 minutes now and I suspect this will eventually fail. It may be my iPhone just won't talk to the iCloud in any way. Hopefully for others, this is just a problem with my phone and not a general problem with 3G phones + IOS5 + iCloud. Anyway, I've another appointment with the Genius Bar; maybe they will have an idea to resolve this. Probably next is to wipe the phone completely back to factory image and start over. Gee, don't I like that idea.

Here's an update on what I posted yesterday.

After turning OFF Calendar Notification in SETTINGS > NOTIFICATION > CALENDAR, the following is the latest status:

1) My iPhone 4 is very responsive. Two of my colleagues who did the same on iPhone 3GS have also had similar benefits.

2) CPU averages below 10%.

3) A fully charged battery lasts almost 12 - 14 hrs before it drops below 20% charge (I don't use the phone that much ... not more than 20 - 30 mins/day. I do check/send mails, FB and Instagram). I have configured emails for Exchange, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and me.com ... don't ask me why I have so many 😁.

4) My iCloud is ON and is working fine (only iCloud Calendar and Contacts are OFF as I don't need them).

5) IMPORTANT: Although the Calendar Notification is turned OFF, the pop-up Calendar Alerts still works ... so I won't miss any meetings. Bcoz Calendar Notification is turned OFF, it does not appear in Pull-Down Notification screen ... I can live with this minor issue.

If people in this forum benefit from what I have discovered by trial & error, I'm very happy ... Cheers Folks!

Message was edited by: LinuxFan

Either Soft or Hard reset as suggested by @tozzle should work for you @markie308511

Hello

I have done a full reset of the phone with the new ios 5 installed and its still doing stuff what i dnt want it to do,

i go and type a msg or email and random letters start appering, i go to click on a app and it doesnt open and

and the the screen just goes wild.

what else you think i should do?

i have already been to apple to change my iphone as my last on was restarting it slef while im on the phone.

my iphone is a 3GS

My 3GS is dirt slow as well after the iOS 5 "upgrade". I get a txt message popup and click "reply", a blank message screen opens (no message thread in the view, just blank), after 10 seconds it closes. Reopen, wait, then I get a thread to reply to.

Facebook opens with splash screen and sits there, then crashs.

I have iCloud set to sync photos when on wifi. Guess from what I read, I'm going to have to turn off that crap and turn off calendar notifications.

My thoughts, Apple puts out these "upgrades" that some apps "require", so you will install it, so it slows down your phone to the point that you have to buy new hardware. My next upgrade will be Android.

I'm proposing turning off features as temporary measure, untill Apple issues the fix. Don't get me wrong, I'm not proposing these as permanent fixes.

BTW, it's been a few days since i "fixed" my 3GS. It's still fast, so... I will turn the features on one by one in an attempt to isolate the problem

Thanks for the tip. My phone was painfully slow after update. 'Notification off' fixed my issues.

3Gs here also... haven't noticed a significant battery drain, beyond the ridiculously low battery life the phone has had all along. What is happening now, since upgrade, though, is apps (even basic apps like calendar) are hanging up after making changes... I will hit the end/close/save/etc. button to close my action and it won't close. I have to shut off the phone to get it to close.

Agree with the user post above about a warning prior to upgrade.

Apple: I was a Blackberry user for 10 years before coming to iPhone and HATED the phone due to dropped calls for the 1.5 years I've owned it... you actually almost had me in the mindset of getting a new 4s when I upgrade, mostly due to the new Siri virtual assistant... now with these post iOS 5 issues, I'm re-thinking very seriously (Siri-ously).

Using iPhone 3Gs, upgraded to IOS5 and had the same problem as everyone else... but I FIGURED OUT MY PROBLEM. Hopefully it helps someone.

Here is what I did..

Downloaded a free CPU monitoring application to see if anything had any affect. The CPU monitor showed CPU at 100% most of the time... battery just getting drained. So...

1.) Hard boot, still same problem. CPU 100%

2.) Deleted ALL of my email contacts. Hard boot. CPU 100%

3.) Soft Boot CPU 100%

4.) Deleted iCloud account. CPU 0 -> 15%

It would appear, at least for me, that the problem was iCloud. I'll wait for an update before I turn back on. Now I got to go and re-enter all my e-mail accounts!!!

I thought Apple was better than PC. 🙂

I kept getting the phone into a better state only having it start failing again as I went through different apps I use regularly. Finally narrowed it down - at least for my phone.

First, to clean up all the lockups and failing apps, I found I must do a full reset of the phone and then "setup as new phone". During setup I opted to not use iCloud, then after setup is complete I could turn on cloud sync for items one at a time. I discovered that the problem in my case is the contact data. Contacts sync fine with my MacBook and even with Outlook on my workstation (although it handles the contact groups created on my Mac oddly); but, it absolutely will not sync to my iPhone. If I turn on sync'ing contacts, the phone goes into an endless grind of trying to talk to the cloud (I've let it run for hours to no avail), and the CPU is pegged and I can't turn it off. I end up having to do a full reset of the phone again to get back to a good quiescent state.

The other important thing is to not restore from iTunes as the restore points just go back to everything being turned on and immediately put the phone in a crashing/hanging/unhappy state. So, after doing reset all and restore as new phone, I turn on cloud sync, one feature at a time until I have everything on and sync'ed except contacts, then manually set up all my email accounts, and then hook up to iTunes and do a sync to get apps, music and ringtones. Then, of course, I have to manually reconfigure all apps.

In the end, everything works except I have no contacts and I've lost any stored data in apps (since I can't do a restore to get the app data back).

Maybe next time Apple releases an bug fix update to iOS I'll give it all another try - after all, the new restore points created now when I sync should be safe. I really hate to be forced by Apple's bugs into buying a new phone, but there's the old question, "do you want to be happy or do you want to be right". Still, the Apple ain't looking so crisp and shiny this week.