[Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini, Mini Pro, Xperia Pro, A] geekoo:
Analysis, Background and Testing Process

Analysis

After all the tests, it turns out that good ol' CM ROMs are still the best. CM9 is quite awesome on this phone and my primary 'focus' - the camera runs the best and fastest on CM9/FXP. Only trouble was with the graphics benchmarks - it performed well on some and not so well on others. Wonder why? Even the latest graphics drivers did not help.

I thought MiUI ROMs are heavy, but surprisingly it performed rather well. So did the stock ROMs though it had a lot of bloatware. I guess that the stock ROMs are highly optimized since they are made for the phone in the first place.

On the other hand, a ROM that had been quite hyped - KA21 quite simply sucked. And not just with Benchmarks, but it was just plain unusable and was all laggy and slow. I couldn't even go through with the tests and got fed up midway through.

What was interesting was on that on a whole all ROMs behaved almost the same. So its just a matter of preference whether you install a lot o 3rd party apps - then you need the ones with higher internal memory free after installation. Also, with 3rd party apps - like music, browser, movies etc. behave almost exactly the same - which is why you see it grayed out. The difference between the ROMs seemed to be in how efficient their media scanner and IO throughput was. After the first few runs of each app, the next runs were pretty much identical. So when your app is already buffered, then subsequent access is superfast.

Unfortunately subsequent accesses are limited by the amount of free RAM. And some heavy ROMs here leave very little free RAM to the apps. This is where you need a good balance of free ROM and good memory management in the ROMs.

The best balance that I found - for my needs, was FXP/CM9 and I am sticking to that.

All in all, it will just come down to personal preference of look and feel - whether someone prefers Sony's look, or stock Android's look,or MiUI's convenience and ease of use.

18th September:

I added a couple more ROMs to the mix. I tried the much demanded Jelly Sandwich - it felt nice and looked very promising, but somehow did not deliver. I had a lot of expectations from this ROM. Benchmark scores turned out quite pathetic and this ROM ranks among the low ones. I felt so bad that I even tried a barebones version by removing almost everything and choosing the lightest components but performance did not improve significantly enough even to pull it from the orange or yellow band to one band higher.

I also benchmarked a gingerbread ROM, but even that did not deliver to my expectation. Looks like some of the best ROMs are the ICS roms. In fact I even tried a JB rom, but most of it did not work and I just did not continue with the benchmarking.

20th September:

Looks like some new ICS GPU drivers are doing the rounds. I've never seen the Ray pull off such great FPSes before. Flylight has got the best driver yet, hope it rubs off on the others.

Background

I had thought of starting off a new thread for a personal comparison that I am doing. I felt this would benefit others as well who loves playing around with ROMs, or who is looking for a ROM that suits their needs on paper.

I have tried out almost all ROMs on the forum for the Xperia Ray and like a spoilt child, I am never satisfied with any one. Probably the longest that I have had one is for 2 weeks. When I think back, I realize that most ROMs were chucked away - primarily because of boredom; but an other reason was that the performance deteriorated or I was not able to play some touted games.

I have now settled down to the following facts

1. Xperia Ray is not meant to play games (debatable - but that's my stand)

2. If you fill the last MB on the phone with apps, the performance is bound to drop

So, I have decided to do a un-scientific study of the various ROMs that are currently there to decide on one ROM and settle on it for a while (1-2 months at least :silly: )

The control device is my 5 month old Ray. It has a 16GB Class 10 card. The kernel is a XRay v7.3.431 overclocked to 1.4GHz. (the only exception would probably be the FXP ROMs which comes with its own kernel and I don't suppose it runs on the XRay)

The device will have a factory reset, all possible wipes, all possible formats, before installing the ROM and taking readings. There will be some measurements, some benchmarks, and some 'feeling' measurements. Nothing will be installed other than the benchmark tools and I will remove all apps from the recently-run apps before taking each measurement.

Testing Process

The setup of the phone is as follows for the tests

Preparation

1. Factory reset

2. Wipe cache

3. Wipe dalvik

4. Format system

5. Format data

6. Format cache

ROM Installation

1. Install ROM

2. Install any dependent patches

3. Flash compatible Kernel (if required, else stick to XRay 7.3.431)

4. Do initial setup - without using a google account

5. Overclock to 1.4GHz (use built in configuration, or install No-Frills CPU)

6. Set CPU Governer = SmartAssV2, IO Scheduler = noop (where possible)

7. Let phone rest for 5 minutes

8. Switch on WiFi

9. Activate GPS and location usage

10. Switch on installation from unknown sources

11. Add a google account and sync only browser and contacts

12. Let phone rest for 5 minutes after sync is complete

13. Go into Airplane mode

14. Keep charger plugged in

15. Start tests

Tests

1. Unload all apps from recent apps

2. Install app for testing (other than stock or whatever exists on the phone)

3. Run tests

4. Uninstall app

5. Repeat for next test

Note: All apps (for testing loading times) are opened once to dismiss off with popups and notifications and so that any caching and optimization can be done. They are then unloaded and tests are started. Theory is that the user is concerned with the speed of loading for commonly used apps, so they would have been opened many times and optimized/cached.

Q: Is there a way to integrate the google docs spreadsheet inline in this forum? Will make my life that much easier. Or at least a way to embed a HTML table into this post?