[Motorola Droid RAZR] Ohmster:
Can I step in here and shed some light?

I have been somewhat overjoyed and telling everyone how good CM11 is after being plagued by very kind of dropout you can think of. WiFi stops, Signal degrades until I get "No service", GPS stops working, Bluetooth not connecting to paired device or needs repairing again. And after being so thrilled with this release (REAL, Proactive memory management, at last!), I get all these problems. The magic bullet that seems to fix everything is to boot to recovery and wipe the dalvik, then allow it to rebuilt during bootup. Yeah, you can wipe cache while at it, but dalvik is the culprit. I am pissed and I want more for my money. (CM is free, but time is money and I got a LOT of time into this.) So, in order to better understand this, I have to know what the hell a "dalvik" really is? A cache is more or less a scratchpad for the CPU, much like the ones we used as kids to learn math in school. A temporary holding area for all things used by the system that are not permanent I get it. Dalvik is "The Virtual Machine" used by the system. What is that? Anyone who used VMware to install a different OS or used Windows 7's Virtual XP is familiar with this.It creates a virtual operating system in memory where XP. Linux, Apple OS, or almost anything can run and not install to the hard drive. Any viruses or harmful things are confined to the virtual machine. When shut down, it creates a .vhd file that is very large on your hard disk. This is the virtual machine that will open and run again, same way you left it. Even Windows 7 Backup makes vhd files when it creates a system image of your entire hard drive to restore in the event of a tragic event that destroys the system like a hard drive failure. Huh! So all the bits and pieces, apks files and modules and kernel and everything else that has to come together to make Android run are "pre-assembled" into a working OS and saved as a virtual machine and it runs from there, this is the dalvik cache. (Experts, correct me if I am wrong please.)

So what the hell keeps corrupting this virtual machine in daily use that I must wipe it out and recreate it now at least once a day? Not sure. But I do know that I built my CM11 many weeks ago, possibly a month or more, saved a seemingly good backup after installing all my accounts and desktops and arranging them the way I like. That was a lot of work and I dread doing it all over again. These original backups were created in the days when almost everything needed a patch. Camera patchy, wifi patch, wifi ap patch, jbx kernel for the camera. There was so much crap in this stew I didn't even know what I was eating anymore. I had since stopped patching when updating and yet I still have these problems. So I told everyone with problems to make a clean slot, I use slot one in SS 3.6.5, install the latest CM11 rom and gapps, and it should run fine. JBX if you want and I will tell you, that trickster apk did some cool stuff to save battery or make this baby scream performance. But performance would lock up the phone sooner or later. Hard to take my own medicine but I did, wiped out slot one, recreated with each option for space bumped up by one. Only flashed CM11 and gapps, and the phone ran without a hiccup. Nothing crapped out, never lost wifi, AP signal, GPS, camera fine, and it stayed that way. I did install xposed framework, some modules for tweaking nice, and did restore my original system ID in Titanium Backup. Smooth as silk!

But the other day, I notices my bars for phone service dropping in a well covered area. Made a call on barely one bar and it worked. Soon as the bars were all gone, so was the service. Oh no, my beautiful CM11 is ruined, again? Let me guess, dalvik! Rebooted to recovery, wiped dalvik, booted to system, and ta da! My bars and service were fine again and never dropped like that anymore. Sure, at times they would drop but came back up right away. I am using this rainbow bars theme from Xposed but what do bars mean anyway? The answer can be found in your Settings.

Settings/About Phone/Status. Look at Signal Strength. Mine in the screenshot is -73dB,. which is pretty good. At this moment, I am getting -70dB. Twice as good and sitting in the same spot. 3 db is "double". Ten dB is ten times as much. In the case of a phone signal, lower is better when minus dB scale is used. So if you want to really know how good your signal is, look in your settings and find the real dB signal strength. Who knows, there is probably an app for it if you look around. I haven't had any trouble since that one day. Maybe system is "settling in" or updating apps is causing the dalvik to corrupt while in use. I don't know. I see there is an update and read the changelog, it does fix an issue with a leak in the dalvik. Like a memory leak on a PC and that is where my problem is so I updated from the menu. Phone is working great. No JBX because if this does fail, it is a LOT less to troubleshoot but it really does work quite well now. I think this rom is mature enough where we can stop using words like "dirty update". When you update your Verizon phone from the menu as an OTA update, nobody calls that "dirty", it is just an update and almost always a welcome one. Updating CM11 should be no different unless you are playing with very early releases, which means you are either an idiot, have a spare phone and like to play, or are a techie geek like me who plans to spend a LOT of time updating, wiping, trying again, and trying again until the rom matures enough. (Nobody get insulted about being a techie geek. I am one, I did want the newest and best, and I was prepared for the time loss of lots of updating while I learned things. Besides, being the best geek is rather cool and there are chicks who think that is sexy!) :laugh:

Actually, I did not want to be THAT geeky and spend many a night updating to get rid of bugs, but the reports of Kit Kat were so exciting and positive that I decided to take the plunge. Now I can say it was worth it. The memory management of previous versions of Android were HORRIBLE! You buy the best phone, it is like greased lightning fast. All of your apps are constantly updating, almost every day it seems. In a year you could not even make a 911 call until your phone was good and ready to give you a turn at what little memory was being fought over by all these apps that never want to stop or sleep. Many have no exit options, only reduce to the home screen so they always run. Facebook was a memory hog, even games like Let's Golf 3 which was pretty graphically intense would not quit. You could use the home button to get to your desktop but could never end "the game". Even if you killed it in apps, a minute later it is in memory, running again, taking what little memory is left away from the owner who wants to use maps or make a phone call. My greased lightning is gone! Not in CM11. Apps never get away with that crap again. You need to use your phone, I BET it will be responsive and waiting for you, not like Jellybean at all! CM11 kicks ass and the only two items I flashed were cm11 and gapps. OTA updates work like they should.

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