4 ms·

Can someone explain to me why (outside of this one issue) phones get so slow over time? As a professional programmer I though I understood computers but I clea

by habosa 9y ago

Can someone explain to me why (outside of this one issue) phones get so slow over time? As a professional programmer I though I understood computers but I clearly don't. What's going on my phone that it grinds to a halt? Why does a factory reset sometimes help, but sometimes not? It can't just be that the workloads are more resource intensive. If I go get an old tablet it will take 5x as long to load google.com as the day I bought it.

spamizbad 9y ago
This article does a good job of explaining the main reason: To retain runtime on a degraded battery, they underclock/undervolt the hardware.. drawing less power and producing less performance. This honestly accounts for mobile device performance loss in the majority of cases and it isn't iPhone or Apple-specific. A resets might improve performance of the flash device if it frees up additional space or does something similar to an SSD "trim" event.
- Puer 9y ago
  Pretty much. I was still using the original Galaxy S when the Galaxy S6 was the hot new toy. I was able to use it despite its archaic hardware on the latest versions of Android because I forced the CPU to always run at maximum speed instead of throttling. I couldn't get around the minimal amount of RAM that came installed with the phone, but the CPU trick helped immensely day to day.
- habosa 9y ago
  This implies I could fix all my old phones with a new battery ... Could that possibly be true?
  - spamizbad 9y ago
    Probably. I replaced the battery in my iPhone 4S and iPhone 6 a little after a year. I did it mostly for more battery life, but I haven't noticed significant performance degradation.
sliverstorm 9y ago
If I go get an old tablet it will take 5x as long to load google.com as the day I bought it. Once upon a time, google.com was like five lines of HTML. Google loved to brag about how they didn't even close their tags, because the page still rendered and it saved bytes. Now I measure it at 300+ lines and 200KB, not counting assets. Same generally goes for every software you know and love.
alkonaut 9y ago
If you load the exact same OS and the exact same browser+page, or the exact same app (same version) then if it's slower it's hardware, such as battery (which is described in the article). If you take your 5yo tablet and load the 5years younger OS, a 5years younger app or a 5 year younger version of google, those are designed to be "usable" on modern hardware, and "just bearable" on your older hardware. So it's not apples to apples then. You are running an app (or page) that is much much fatter. And yes it even applies to the google front page.

by habosa 9y ago

spamizbad 9y ago

This article does a good job of explaining the main reason: To retain runtime on a degraded battery, they underclock/undervolt the hardware.. drawing less power and producing less performance. This honestly accounts for mobile device performance loss in the majority of cases and it isn't iPhone or Apple-specific. A resets might improve performance of the flash device if it frees up additional space or does something similar to an SSD "trim" event.

Puer 9y ago
Pretty much. I was still using the original Galaxy S when the Galaxy S6 was the hot new toy. I was able to use it despite its archaic hardware on the latest versions of Android because I forced the CPU to always run at maximum speed instead of throttling. I couldn't get around the minimal amount of RAM that came installed with the phone, but the CPU trick helped immensely day to day.
habosa 9y ago
This implies I could fix all my old phones with a new battery ... Could that possibly be true?
- spamizbad 9y ago
  Probably. I replaced the battery in my iPhone 4S and iPhone 6 a little after a year. I did it mostly for more battery life, but I haven't noticed significant performance degradation.

sliverstorm 9y ago

If I go get an old tablet it will take 5x as long to load google.com as the day I bought it. Once upon a time, google.com was like five lines of HTML. Google loved to brag about how they didn't even close their tags, because the page still rendered and it saved bytes. Now I measure it at 300+ lines and 200KB, not counting assets. Same generally goes for every software you know and love.

alkonaut 9y ago

If you load the exact same OS and the exact same browser+page, or the exact same app (same version) then if it's slower it's hardware, such as battery (which is described in the article). If you take your 5yo tablet and load the 5years younger OS, a 5years younger app or a 5 year younger version of google, those are designed to be "usable" on modern hardware, and "just bearable" on your older hardware. So it's not apples to apples then. You are running an app (or page) that is much much fatter. And yes it even applies to the google front page.