[Galaxy S I9000 General] jozto:
Experience with cyanogenmod-12-1-adc-team

Hello friends,

Let me thank all great developers here, and especially Christopher and the ADC Team, whose CyanogenMode 12.1 ROM I have been using for more than 4 months, as my daily phone.

I returned to my old SGS+ several months ago, when my newer Sony Xperia M broke. That Sony has better CPU and RAM specs, however, I get enchanted every time I turn on our SGS' great display. Yes, it still attracts my emotions, and I feel happy everytime it acomplishes something new ;)

Let me put some notes about my experience wth that ROM:

The CyanogenMod 12.1 ROM makes the phone feel quite anew. I have used some other ROMs before, but this one is of the highest quality.

The system boots quite fast, and I can say it is also quite stable.

I think the essential setting to make the phone work is to maximize the number of background apps and background services. For some reason it is by default set to a low number (it was 2 if I remember well). Certainly, when you install many apps they might install services, hoverer, current GAPPS run 7 services easily, so it is more than appropriate to increase the limits. The settings are available in the Advanced settings app, Performance tab, and I have simply set them to the maximum - 32 background apps and 24 background services.

As far as I understand this functionality, if the number is lower than number of installed services, a service gets killed and restarted repeatedly (you could notice that behaviour directly in Settings, Apps, Running Apps tab). After increasing the limits this restarting behaviour disappears, and that means the phone gets (at last :) ) (more) responsive.

To set another settings I mention below I used the Kernel Adiutor app.

Another point of my interest was the ZRAM - the compressed swap space in memory. I left the default swap size of 120 MB (the number is accually the maximum size of uncompressed data that go to swap). I don't fully understand how does the system manage free memory since the actual and precise size of compressed data is unpredictable, and as such I feel there may be times that the swap space and the ordinary memory overlap ... or perhaps just exhaust the whole memory. There is one more parameter that controls the usage of swap: swappiness. My personal experience is that setting it to 100 makes the phone more responsive, compared to the default setting of 40. However, the setting 100 instructs system to swap everything as soon as possible. I guess that means also background processes get swapped and back every time they are used. Now I favor swappiness of 98, that might give chance to some processes not to get swapped, while keeping the phone responsive.

Even with ZRAM, programs that use lots of RAM are still difficult to run on our SGS+, for example any HTML5 web browser can use tens and hundreds megabytes of RAM while rendering a modern responsive web page.

Another setting that helped was setting the CPU governor. The default On demand setting was fine, however, I found it was useful to increase the minimum CPU frequency from 245MHz to 368MHz. For example Gmail loads much faster with this setting (e.g 7 seconds instead of 12). I admit other CPU governor could be set that could have the same effect or better.

I tried overclocking the CPU, however, system became less stable. After several days, the phone started to turn off or restart , and it took me some time to actually find out the restarts were caused by overclocking.

Currently I have quite many apps installed ( including Duolingo, Memrise, YouVersion Bible that run background processes), and the performance is quite acceptable. However, my opinion is biased, and I always cross fingers to my little SGS ;) - sometimes it requires a bit of patience.

I have successfully used it as a GPS navigator in a car, however, must be plugged to charger. The phone requires charging every night, or even more often, the battery life is heavily depending on use.

And the last note regarding stability - about once a day I experience a problem: a sudden restart (I guess usually when browsing Web), or the phone turns off, or, more precisely, does not turn on when home/power button pressed. The solution is to long press the power button, the phone usually starts and registers the SIM card.

I hope that information could be useful to someone using SGS+.