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User profile for user: Catatonic
Catatonic Author
User level: Level 2
401 points

Advice: Do not update iPad 3 to iOS 9. Problems! Lag!

I updated my iPad 3 to iOS 9 yesterday (and downgraded today; thankfully Apple is still signing iOS 8.4.1).


Some background info: all of my apps were updated prior to me updating to iOS 9. I had 23 GB of free space on my 64 GB device. Mine is an iPad 3 wifi only. I have a fast broadband internet connection.


I experienced the following problems after upgrading to iOS 9: I play a lot of games on my iPad 3. Games like Hearthstone were extremely laggy on iOS 9. My turns would often end before the animations ended and before I had finished playing my turn. Everything took noticeably longer, whether it was looking at my cards, finding a matchup, etc. I got disconnected from the game a few times. Other games and apps were also affected with lag. I would make a selection and nothing would happen until a few seconds later.


I tried the following fixes to no avail to see if they would help speed up games and apps on my iPad 3 under iOS 9: 1. Turned off Background App refresh; 2. Turned off all notifications; 3. Checking email set to manual; 4. Under Settings/Accessibility/Reduce Motion - turned off Reduce Motion; 5. Under Settings/Accessibility/Increase Contract/Reduce Transparency - turned off Reduce Transparency; 6. Turned off Location Services; 7. Shut down all other apps while playing a game; 8. Disabled App Store automatic downloads; 9. Turned off Spotlight Suggestions and Bing Web Results and all apps from indexing in Spotlight; 10. Disabled iCloud sync. 11. Shut down and restart device.


In short, I tried everything I could think of to speed up iOS 9 on my iPad 3, and failed. I have now downgraded to iOS 8.4.1 and Hearthstone and my other games and apps are running snappily again.


Based on my experience, I cannot recommend that anyone with an older device like an iPad 2 or 3, or the equivalent in an old iPhone, update to iOS 9. Especially if that device is your main way of playing games.


Hopefully this helps anyone with an older device considering an upgrade to iOS 9.

iPad 3rd generation-OTHER, iOS 8.4.1, 64 GB, wifi only model

Posted on Sep 28, 2015 4:05 PM

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65 replies
User profile for user: MichelPM
MichelPM
User level: Level 10
81,284 points

Oct 29, 2016 8:51 AM in response to PCNYC

Your lag issues ARE because your iPad has a piddly 200 MBs left of free storage.

This is nowhere near enough data storage headroom space for the iPad's OS to operate with.

Computer OSes need a certain amount of free data space available to it, so the OS has room to swap all sorts of data to operate. NOT all of OS and its functionality are written to just a system ROM chip!

iOS needs, at the very minimum, 2 to 3 GBs of free data storage space for an iDevice to function, more or less, normally.

4 to 6 GBs would be better to maintain for free storage space to insure normal, optimal iDevice performance.

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User profile for user: PCNYC
PCNYC
User level: Level 1
14 points

Oct 29, 2016 9:30 AM in response to MichelPM

Point taken - and acknowledged. I never said my lag issues weren't because of lack of space and I'm not arguing that fact. I will however say that it never lagged as much under the same conditions (i.e with such little space) under iOS6.


2 to 3 Gb headroom (which you're saying iOS9 needs) on a 16Gb machine doesn't leave you with much, so back to my advice that if you're on iOS6 and happy enough with it, then stay on it to avoid these issues. If Safari under OS6 hadn't been as troublesome for me I'd happily have stayed on it...

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User profile for user: MichelPM
MichelPM
User level: Level 10
81,284 points

Oct 29, 2016 10:46 AM in response to PCNYC

Things changed with the introduction of iOS 7, NOT iOS 9.

iOS 7 and up got more resource intensive.

So, leaving 3 GBs, or so, of free storage is really necessary.

EVEN, with iOS 6, if you let free space dip to 2 GBs and lower, performance started to suffer.

This was no different on iOS 6 except there was a lower minimum tolerance of free storage space.

What I stated applies across the board based on my 6 years of using iPads.

Plus, 16 GB models were notorius of filling up to point where device functionality always was an issue.

With 16 GB iDevices having a usable space of only 12-13 GBs to start and having to maintain roughly 20-25% of the total usable storage space, a 16 Gb iDevice only had a total of 9-10 GBs of REAL usable space.


This is why Apple, very recently, FINALLY acquiesced and made an admission that 16 GB storage model iDevices really had very little usable storage space on them for anything and killed all 16 GB model iDevices for baseline models.


Apple starts baseline iDevices now at 32 GBs ( approx. 25-26 GBs of usable storage space) which is about 2-1/2 times more than what was really available on a 16 GBs storage model iDevice and has the ability to really store some decent amount of data at that new baseline storage amount.

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Advice: Do not update iPad 3 to iOS 9. Problems! Lag!

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