Screen very slow to repopulate on Droid 1

**symphonia** · 04-25-2011, 07:29 PM

Hi. I suspect this is a topic that has been discussed already, but I cannot find it. I have a Moto Droid 1, running 2.2.2, and for the past several months it has been driving me crazy. Whenever I use a larger app (e.g. Angry Birds, sometimes with using web browser), and then hit the home button, I am taken to a home screen that just shows my wallpaper, no apps or widgets. After 30 seconds or so, they all show up again. I can scroll right or left and those screens are blank too. I can hit the app drawer icon on the bottom of the screen, and it takes me to an empty app drawer. This all resolves if I let the phone sit, but it is extremely annoying. I have my phone loaded with apps, but my wife's phone has lots of available memory, and this happens to her too (on her Droid 1).

Any ideas how to fix this?

**Drillbit** · 04-26-2011, 01:45 AM

What sort of widgets do you have on your home screen?

When this delay happens, do you see a two circle arrows icon next to the 3G symbol on the top bar? This is an indicator that the phone is undergoing a sync at the same time.

Does your phone feel sluggish when you are experiencing this delay?

I can't recreate this exactly with my phones, so I would have to theorize the possibilities based on similar symptoms.

1. Complex screen widgets can cause delay. Try removing some widgets on the screen and see if the response improves.

2. A bit too much background syncing caused by services and apps. You have to lengthen the time intervals between syncs or reduce the number of syncs daily.

Other possibilities:

Are you using live wallpaper? Not likely to cause it what you're seeing though.

Possible disk fragmentation of the SD card. This slows down disk I/O, including caching of the UI.

**Drillbit** · 04-26-2011, 02:20 AM

What other larger apps do you experience this? Do you experience this with any "small" app?

I got another theory is that this "large" app maybe "leaking" memory, which is a term used that the app keeps gobbling more and more memory as time goes by and doesn't relinquish used memory allocation back to the operating system. The culprits are usually large memory footprint native apps (usually games) that don't do proper garbage collection. Which is why I ask you what other apps. With these apps, their memory demands keep growing until it pushes parts of the operating system out of RAM and into the disk as a caching file, which is also the reason why I ask you about disk (my habit of saying phone memory or SD card) file fragmentation.

When you press the Home button, you merely exited, but not quited this large, memory gobbling app. And in around 30 seconds, which probably is the time the OS is allowing the app to "live" when its not being used, the app is then either killed or paused and then cached to the SD. My advice then is probably, you have to go back to the app, properly quit it, or kill it with Managing Apps on settings. A task killer is not usually advised but this is an exception, though I would advice you only kill the big app, and not anything else, despite the temptation of seeing all the list of all the smaller apps whose processes are running.

I distinctly remember now this used to happen on my early Androids with the smaller RAM (the Droid 1 is only 256mb) but the issue faded as phones shifted to 512mb, and now even 768mb or even 1Gb. Its identical in symptoms to what I experienced with PCs years ago, running heavy graphics intensive games and your RAM isn't a lot. When you switched out of the game, it took a while before the Windows desktop to reassemble.

**symphonia** · 05-02-2011, 11:15 AM

Thanks for your interest and help, Drillbit. Sorry for the delayed response. I have experienced this delay at times with just about any app, but very regularly with larger games, often with the web browser. I do have several widgets running: DigiClock, Weather, Google search bar, and the stock Power control bar, and Mototorch. I have tried clearing the cache frequently with aCCleaner, which hasn't seemed to do any good. I typically have 40-50 MB of RAM available. If this is a RAM issue, is there any way to fix it? Is there a way to defrag the SD card if that is an issue?

Thanks again!

**smythe302** · 07-08-2011, 12:01 PM

I have the same issue, some wigits, all apps large and small. I think it started acting up when the 1GHz phones came out and Android was updated. The Droid 1 500Mhz processer isn't enough resource to handle the OS. It worked great when i could kill tasks using advanced task killer. I think the first or second OS update moved that responsability into the OS.