[Android General] NYLimited:
A little improvement for you

Android has numerous ways to tweak performance - way too many for a single post. There is absolutely no substitute for reading and learning more about the internals of various Android systems. Short of writing a book (no plans for that!) I shall not attempt to explain them all or even most. Some of them, when applied incorrectly, will make your device perform poorly or even stop it from functioning (bootloops, no boot, etc.)

Note that these ideas are not specific to an installation type (e.g. NAND only, DataOnExt or NativeSD) but rather to using an SD Card with your installation.

Please keep in mind that these suggestions will not completely eliminate lags, especially during startup. Android has to do what Android has to do. :) Likewise, if you are using a relatively old device (like the HD2 that I am using) it cannot act completely like the latest technology. That is just reality.

Don't forget that no matter what you do to your device and how much you tweak it if you are using a sub-par SD Card (and there are many of those) not much else will matter or help.

Before you do anything else make sure your card's FAT partition was formatted with SD Format to get the best cluster size and format for it. Of course, if you have data on the card it'd be a good idea to back it up first. ;)

I will only get into two of the simple and relatively safe methods here. They can make a significant impact on your system.

Since this topic is about SD Cards it assumes you are using an SD Card for apps and/or data and/or Dalvik... Two quick and easy ways to improve your device's response involve read buffers (already mentioned here) and your device's Auto Memory Manager (AMM). Both of the settings described here are lost after a reboot if they are not re-applied!

A read buffer can be set for your card via shell script (init.d support required) or by various apps, such as ROM Toolbox. I will use the latter for illustrations aiming this for people relatively new to Android. If you prefer to do things another way I agree there are a number of other ways to do it.

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If your buffer is too small it will accomplish nothing. As an example, using a 256KB buffer with a 32KB cluster size it will yield a factor of 8 reading clusters! I suspect that is not very efficient. Setting a 16384KB read buffer will increase the same operation to a factor of 512 - saving nearly 500 cluster reads. The resulting performance increase can be dramatic. Please remember to experiment - while a large buffer may do wonders (as it did for me) it is not always the best choice. See

this post

for a little contrast.

The read buffer is, unfortunately, far from being the sole factor when it comes to device performance. As I already said, I will not go into all of them but a second one that can impact application load times and "lag" is Android's Auto Memory Manager which controls how much free memory is forced by the OS (MinFree). One of the simple ways to set it is once again ROM Toolbox. Try the settings in this image, along with a (relatively) large read buffer, reboot your system and let things settle down. You might just find your device's response a little better. :)

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Incidentally, experimenting with these settings is not very likely to do any harm to your system as long as you do not pick and specify random (unrealistic) values. Most apps that allow you to alter these settings will use relatively safe numbers. Trying different values ( at least for a few hours each) may just tell you

which setting is best for your device

and improve your overall experience quite a bit.