[Motorola Droid RAZR] Ohmster:
Choke Point, 12/06 & TuneIn Radio

[MENTION=3668995]Meneldur[/MENTION] hey buddy, good to hear that you are getting a phone that you can actually use and enjoy again. Hope to see you sometime, but last I heard from you, things were not going so well with CM11. Good luck and happy times on the new phone. Is the LG G3 rooted or does it at least have an available root? I feel bad for the Turbo boys who got the upgrade and had to hang up their root and rom hats. Sad. :(

Is CM11 becoming too "heavy" to run well on Droid Razr Phones?...

God! Another "Editorial". I am sorry guys, I just do not know how to say this stuff in few words. :(

I never shut my phone off. I go to bed, put on charge, take it the next day, and repeat this and never reboot or turn it off. If I run low on battery near the end of day, I put on charge for a couple of hours. Without the ability to change batteries, I don't want to get stuck with no battery.

I have been telling everyone how great 12/06 is and it is, but tonight I had a MAJOR choke on a short ride to a friend's house. It is a 13 mile ride, about 20 minutes. About 11 miles of it on the highway, I-95. I like to use Bluetooth Connect to car audio and stream music while I drive. This time I decided to use TuneIn Radio because they have a Beatles channel and I just heard Hey Jude on the radio. Man, TuneIn took forever to load. I got the green TuneIn screen, then black with lit buttons, and it stuck there. I could do nothing, 2 minutes and it has not gone away. I cycle the lock screen and get the Not Responding dialog, close, wait, report. And I close. I Google Play Music and I have a hard time finding my albums by search, get a song, hit play, and when it finally plays, the bars on screen are moving, meaning playing, but no music from speaker or car audio. I hear the pops in car audio every time I touch screen, but no music. I give up and reboot. It takes quite a while at the CyanogenMod animation and when booted, I get the 4G indicator but bars are "clear" meaning, "no bars"? Since I am driving a car, I cannot go to Settings/About Phone/Status for a real signal level and Voice Typing is working. But I have offline voice tying Exposed installed.

I miss my exit on the freeway with so much "phone fussing" at the wheel, it is dark, and I have to make a U-Turn on the freeway at the next exit. Not good. I get to my friend's house and never did get to hear music. Now the phone is rebooted and on the way home, I try Play Music again, this time it works. I stick it out because I actually want to listen to music and drive, NOT fuss with the phone on the dark highway and miss my exit fussing with it!

This has me wondering about the current state of the CM11 roms. Many people have issues with them, seems it started on 11/11, maybe that is why 11/07 works so good. [MENTION=3313632]ChungHung.Chen[/MENTION] had really good luck with 11/08 and I believe him, but I skipped that update and do not have it. One thing that I fear is roms that start out good, but develop lag and other issues days after installing it. Now this was the first small multitask test of 12/06 and needless to say, it failed miserably. I know I cannot multitask much on the Razr, but Bluetooth should not load down the phone at all, it is just an alternative audio output. And since when are things like Pandora or TuneIn or Slacker "Boated slow down apps"? Are the current run of CM11 builds finally becoming "too much" for our old dog phones?

CM11 is a rom that will almost be "outdated" by the time it finally becomes Stable and Release.

It is taking a very long time to finish it's build. Android L is now out and who wants Kit Kat anymore if one can get Lollipop? If CM11 is becoming this much of an issue on a Droid phone, I cannot even *imagine* trying to run Lollipop on it. Because these phones do not meet the basic criteria for Lollipop. Yes, Michael is a very good developer and is determined to get Lollipop to work on our phones, but will it simply be "too top heavy" with the new OS and all of the "workarounds" needed just to get the OS on the phone? I don't know man. I now envy other users who have a nice new Galaxy with it's big screen, super fast processor, and when these people tap the screen, it dials out, it plays music, and it opens Facebook almost immediately. There is "no waiting for it to open" for them. The Razr is *never* going to be a fast, nice smartphone like it was when it was brand new. I get that part. But this tapping and waiting, new issues popping up, having to reboot, and now missing my exits on the highway, just getting music to play is getting to be "too much".

I think I will backup the 12/06 build I have, revert back to 11/07 for at least a week, and give it the same "test" like I did tonight. Stream some music w/Bluetooth audio and see if it is such an issue. I can stream music and make a call, that should work well. If streaming music, using GPS, AND try to use the phone, I *know* that will break the camel's back. But I need to try this and see if the current roms are just getting to be too much even for our phones because I am really starting to wonder about it. I am a die hard CyanogenMod loyalist, but not to the point where I cannot take a call if listening to music. I just might have to go over to LS, DU, or anything that actually does run fast and run well, if there is such a thing.

Before I revert back to 11/07, I will wipe Dalvik and Cache. Perhaps the rom needs a little "settling in time" and a wipe will clear this up. Worth a shot as it is not lagging now after reboot nor did it show lag before the TuneIn crash.

...yes, yes. I have been saying my phone works well and it is "fast". But "fast" is a relative term for an old phone like ours. Not "Brand New Fast", but it does what it should w/out a prolonged wait. For this phone, that is "fast". And for the most part, this Droid Razr does work well and is fast for it's age. :)

[MENTION=838017]sherri[/MENTION] you are not using CM11 and run Dirty Unicorn, I think. Can you listen to music on your Razr and use the phone or do something else w/out having to "fuss with it" for ten minutes? :p

(That is an exaggeration but sometimes it really is the truth.)

Anyone else find the current build set of CM11 becoming "top heavy" and unwieldy or is it just my imagination? :confused:

EDIT:

Rebooting to recovery, wiping dalvik and cache, then resetting my sound settings and one xposed module did a lot of good. Now the phone is slick and purring again and it is very noticeable. This kind of performance is what impressed me the first time I installed this rom. Maybe I really did need to clean it out. The dalvik cache is really a "Virtual Machine" to speed up the boot process. If that file or files "get old" by updating, then it would stand to reason that performance could suffer. This is very interesting. I would love to see what is in the dalvik partition but think I must view that in recovery as it is not visible while rom is running. Testing carefully now to see if "it sticks". :fingers-crossed:

URL:

I found a really good link explaining this to me here:

Why does my Android device slow down after successive ROM updates without wiping?

This is really good stuff. Here is a direct quote from the page that is answered regarding the dalvik cache among other things:

My phone's performance has been completely restored. It's like night and day.

My question is: Why did that work? What is it about applying successive ROM versions that could cause a slowdown that a wipe would fix?

I did try the LagFix front end for the internal Android fstrim command mentioned in the article. Bad news is that the CM11 kernel does not support it. Well, at least it does not brick a Razr! :)