yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[TouchPad General] DoubleStuff:
Stress Test on Lollipop and Pie

I ran my patented "stress test" of running the two apps, 1) Castbox and 2) Run Race 3D on a couple HP TOUCHPAD tablets ( Lollipop and Pie ). Before I ran the test on them, I ran it on my LG phone just to get a baseline.

The results did not surprise me, because even though I ran the stress test with success on KitKat

with eXteme settings 1836 KHz Overclock a couple weeks ago, I heard that newer versions of Android do not handle the onslaught of advertisements from RunRace 3D in an effective manner. Thus it might be that KitKat will be the only version that can pass this strenuous test. But that being said, yesterday [MENTION=9896613]smithylovestouchpad[/MENTION] ran some tests without installing gApps which can be a memory and resource hog, so that gave me ideas for further testing down the road. I also want to thank [MENTION=3698561]middle_road[/MENTION] and [MENTION=8005714]HP_TOUCHPAD[/MENTION] through their efforts, I learned how to install ADB on my laptop, and also scrcpy which mirrors the touchpad to a screen on the PC.

Well without further ado, you can now view my annotated screenshots of my tests below.

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[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
Nice job. Too bad I don't possess the technical skills like yourself, so will have to wait to see what comes next. :laugh:

Smithy
[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
Alright, so you made me go install RR3D and PodCast Player on my TP that has no Gapps and Swap is not enabled. This first screenshot is just before starting the two apps. I'm gonna keep it to one screenshot per post to make sure there is no confusion.

Note 532mb of memory available even with a weather app and my favorite Battery Monitor Widget running too. And my favorite keyboard, Hacker's Keyboard. And only 804mb of total memory.
[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
OK, this screenshot is after I started the podcast playing, my favorite conservative Mark Levin. :p

Still 433mb memory free.
[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
Now RR3D is running and Mark is chatting away just fine. No glitches or stutters. Still 115mb memory free as reported by Android. Who needs Swap?
[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
And finally, I fired up Quick System Info Pro to see what it's memory function reports. OH wow, it reports 140mb free. Could be how Android measures memory compared to QSIP. But who cares, I'm playing RR3D and playing a podcast over WiFi and the TouchPad is perfectly happy, no Swap, no Max settings and only 804mb of memory available. Sorry I can't do all that fancy split screen measuring the way you do. And remember, my other TouchPad cannot do this and it has Swap, Max, Gapps and all that crap flashed. And don't forget, I've got two weather apps and BMW installed too. The weather apps don't run all the time, but they do pop up from time to time to report the weather. OH, I almost forgot, Hacker's Keyboard is installed too. It takes 10mb up too. And still plenty of memory left over. Ha! Ha! Ha!

Smithy
[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
OK, big boy,it's your turn!!!!! ;)
[TouchPad General] middle_road:
Well that is one hell of an analysis. Nice job.

I keep getting the 'System UI isn't responding' error on a couple of mine.

Most prevalent on the one with EV9. and I'm not 'stressing' it. Time to nuke/re-do it I suppose.

And I did catch the "KA-Bamm" artwork. . .
[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
What part of Eastern Tenn? Love the Chattanooga and Crossville areas. Are you tied to a particular Rom or do you just want Android that is smooth and reliable? Sullin's CM11 really gives you that. What do you use your TouchPad for? Or do you just love the excitement of testing?

Smithy
[TouchPad General] DoubleStuff:
Thanks middle_road, I guess you used to watch the original batman and robin too.

Well I just hope you get your XDA ID fixed so that you can post screenshots, because it will

help in analysis of Systems UI error. Because you know how to run adb on your PC ( because you and HP_TOUCHPAD taught me ) so it would be interesting.

I was in Eastern Tennessee this summer we went down to the Smokey Mountains and also stayed in a nice one horse town called "Townsend" and walked in the Tuckaleechee Caverns.
[TouchPad General] DoubleStuff:
Yes your KitKat passed the patented RAM "stress test" with 115 MB to spare, as per your SWAP comment, well if your run more apps to stress it even more, your KitKat with no swap will finally use LMK ( Low Memory Killer ) to start killing off apps to recover RAM, instead of storing it in SWAP.

I am thinking about creating some kind of 'RAM & SWAP combination stress test', essentially SWAP stores memory that is not in active use, but maybe used later. So I think if you bring up a bunch of apps and have a bunch of apps stored in "recent apps" pager then SWAP is used. If you look at my recent "stress test" you will see not much SWAP was ever used, but the Lollipop and PIE apps went belly up, because Android OS has no need to use SWAP in my "stress test", and even if it did, it would slow it down because SWAP is so much slower than RAM. But I am still trying to learn.

P.S. I can't seem to do anything that eats SWAP, I bring up like 6 or 7 apps and its only uses around 15% of the 1 GB of the SWAP, I am going to have to study more about SWAP.
[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
Yup, I noticed that QSIP was reporting that very little if any of Swap was being used too. But you are talking about Android like it is a multitasking OS like Windows or Apple. Unless you have read something I have not, That is not the case. Heck, WebOS did a pretty good job of having active cards running different apps. There were some attempts at having a split screen type of thing going with Android, but I don't hear much discussed about it lately. And how many screens do you want to have open on a 3" by 5" screen? When an Android app is sitting in the "Recent Apps" Que, it is not really running, but it does hold onto its memory unless it is killed by LMK or offloaded to Swap if it's memory is needed. Normal Android without all this Swap stuff just puts the app into cache and kills stuff when it needs the Ram.

I'm sorry if I am not as enthusiastic about this as you are, but other than playing RR3D and listening to a podcast in the background. I still had 115mb free ram to play with while both were running and no Swap. What possibly could having Swap working get me?

And don't forget the flashing blue lines and I still have random reboots too. That tells me there is some kind of defect in this Swap/Max setup. BTW, did you read my PM? You're trying to stuff one to many guys into the phone booth. I know, I know, it's the challenge of making it work come hell or high water. If I were you, I would put my efforts into making KitKat work as good as possible. These other Roms were never as complete and mature as KK. They all have nagging bugs and issues. Mic, camera, BlueTooth, intermittent WiFi, and memory management as you have pointed out. How do you tell if it is the Swap/Max that is the problem or trying to run Pie on a ten-year-old piece of hardware is the issue causing your problems. Just sayin'.

Smithy

Just thought of a question that I have never seen answered, where exactly is Swap placed? In Ram or the storage drive? I can't imagine it is Ram, how do you cram 1Gb of swap, compressed or not into 1 Gb of Ram and still lhave 900mb of Ram reported as available? If you had a device that had a decent amount of Ram, then I could see a compressed Swap volume. But not on a TouchPad. If HPTP has explained this somewhere, I have not seen it. And while we are at it, what's with the flashing blue lines?
[TouchPad General] Gborg3:
Just thought of a question that I have never seen answered, where exactly is Swap placed? In Ram or the storage drive? I can't imagine it is Ram, how do you cram 1Gb of swap, compressed or not into 1 Gb of Ram and still lhave 900mb of Ram reported as available? If you had a device that had a decent amount of Ram, then I could see a compressed Swap volume. But not on a TouchPad. If HPTP has explained this somewhere, I have not seen it. And while we are at it, what's with the flashing blue lines?[/QUOTE]

I think it was said to be done as a swap file instead of swap partition but I am not sure and even less sure where it is or if it stayed a swap file. My TouchPad needs me to find a computer so I can join back in with this fun.
[TouchPad General] DoubleStuff:
Comments in Blue by DoubleStuff
[TouchPad General] DoubleStuff:
Preliminary Testing of Lollipop

Well what HP_TOUCHPAD said was true, RunRace 3D had advertisements that only KitKat can handle. Now that I installed Pinball Arcade without adds, I will post my results. The problem is I really like playing RunRace 3D, so I searched the internet and one site has a rogue RunRace 3D without adds, and all the power levels applied. But see my pics below, as you see Lollipop passes, it keeps its RAM above the critical 40 MB mark, and also surprisingly at one time was using 25% of the 1 GB of SWAP. I might test PIE this weekend, as you see my battery in the Touchpads are running low.

P.S. in both these test I was streaming a podcast in CASTBOX, and it was loud and clear

I turned off the sound of the pinball game, because its annoying.
[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
I can confirm that I have never had the blue flashing lines until we starting flashing the Swap and Max stuff.

---------- Post added at 03:51 AM ---------- Previous post was at 03:40 AM ----------

If I read your screenshots correctly, the pinball game is not quite as big of a memory hog as RR3D. How strange that the more modern version of Android does not manage the ads as well as KK. I would be interested in seeing what QSIP reports on Swap usage while the two apps are running. And what does Android report on memory usage? Too bad there isn't an ad blocker for Android that could block the ads in games. :silly:
[TouchPad General] DoubleStuff:
Yes your right Pinball ( RAM use: 250 MB ) does not hog memory like RR3D ( RAM use up to 400 MB ). I bet QSIP would report similar usage of SWAP that free -h does, it uses 179 MB of SWAP. Now that I have more RAM to play with I will install QSIP on future test ( frankly because it looks cool ).

As per the memory blocker, here knock yourself out and read this, maybe we can test it on RR3D for PIE......but sounds like that only blocks "browser adds".....

AD BLOCKER FOR ANDROID

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[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
That ad blocker was only wishful thinking. I've had AdBlock Plus installed on my browser on my laptop and in around a year it has blocked over 216,000 ads.

When using QSIP, tap on the memory tab and you will see all the info it tracks including Swap.
[TouchPad General] middle_road:
South of the Knoxville Area - Blount Beach :cool:.

Townsend! Should have bought property there (20) years ago... [SLAMS HEAD AGAINST WALL]

Townsend is the place to go, it's about 15 mins from where we live, I love it there, was over there a month ago for a birthday celebration. “the Peaceful Side of the Smokies.”

Flashing blue lines is very common with the five that I have, across all ROMs.

I even had one that would freeze up on the blue lines and required a hard reboot to get it up.

That one is in my 'parts bin' now.

Swap is the way to go. My IT background tells me that much and I really appreciate the effort [MENTION=8005714]HP_TOUCHPAD[/MENTION] has put into this.

Then Milaq released an updated 4.4.4 with the current sec level. Then I start dinking with that and have to start digging out older versions of apps to side load. (UGGGH!)

The three I'm dinking with currently seem so much snappier.

Then, I figure I must be messing something up because they start acting up..

My EV9 tablet has gone belly upin the last two days. GMail isn't working and neither is Hangouts, and 'System UI isn't responding' is popping up all the time it seems. Nuke & meltdown time...

Can't login to the Google servers. Now that is one that I have not seen before.

I'm running them all, from 4.4.4 to EV9... Sooner or later I'll get it setup for daily use.

I've got Milaq's 4.4.4, 7.1.2 EV, and EV9 going right now on three separate ones currently.

A fourth I need to nuke&flash but haven't had time to back it up lately.

My go-to daily driver is still one that has JCS's 4.4.4 installed on it from years ago.

When the weather turns I'll probably hunker down and start probing these like you all have been doing.

Currently I just want to get one running really well that I can use daily.

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[TouchPad General] DoubleStuff:
Yea, yea Townsend ate at the Trailhead Steakhouse a couple times, and there was a nice Hot Dog/Hamburger/Ice Cream shop big crowd there watching fireworks across the street on July 4th.

You will have to tell us how we can fill up the 1 GB of SWAP, I know how to get the RAM stressed, but how do you stress the SWAP? I look forward to your "winter" analysis, and be sure to have nice snapshots, because remember - "without pictures, its just words..." LOL
[TouchPad General] middle_road:
Everything in Townsend is nice IMO...

I'll get pictures, just won't be able to attach them.... -hehe

Still haven't got that solved despite posting in the HELP forum...
[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
Ah, Pigeon Forge, Gattlinburg, Dollywood. The only real fun time I had there was when the wife and I drove out of town on Roaring Fork Road and found a nice place to stop for a picinc. Nice. Saw some black walnut trees that I haven't seen in years.

************************************************SNIP******************************************************************

Flashing blue lines is very common with the five that I have, across all ROMs.

I even had one that would freeze up on the blue lines and required a hard reboot to get it up.

***************************************SNIP******************************************************************

Just to be clear, these flashing blue lines have something do with what flashing Swap/Max files to the TouchPad. I personally never had this problem before now. But that is one of the risks when you get into modifying settings and code. Would be nice if HPTP would chime in.

Smithy
[TouchPad General] middle_road:
Lots of nice walnut around, now if I could only make some time to create something out in the shop...

*SIGH* and now summer has come and gone yet again.

I've had the 'Blue Flashing' for years now. I figured it was just something to do with the hardware.

Never made the connection with flashing custom ROMs.

My BSOD problems started back in '16 (https://xdaforums.com/hp-touchpad/help/touchpad-version-bsod-t3459767)

There's others going back to '14.

Going to try re-doing my 'white-taped' one now with EV9, it's totally gummed up.

Tried uninstalling Hangouts this morning over coffee and then couldn't get the Play store to load to be able to re-install it. It kept FC'ing.

Some major lag time going on with it in general.
[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
The only blue flash I see consistently is when TWRP is starting, you get a screen full of tightly spaced blue lines for a fraction of a second. Today, my TP that still has Swap/Max still active was sitting on the TouchStone and must have randomly rebooted and when I came back to the house, it was sitting there just flashing away. Had to hard reboot it to get it to stop. Who knows how long it was sitting there doing that, but I am done with this. My other TP with no Gapps works so well. Fast, smooth and no glitches. Even the touch screen is more responsive. There is no reason to put up with a glitchy device when I can get better performance and great battery life. The Gappsless TP gets around -9mA drain while asleep. It is amazing how much memory you get back without Gapps installed. And by signing into my Google account via Chrome, I have access to all the Google services I need like Contacts, Calendar, and the like.

Smithy
[TouchPad General] DoubleStuff:
swappiness

Hello HP_TOUCHPAD and others,

During my test with PIE on this POST 140 ( if you have not looked at the 10 screenshots yet.) I will reference them in this post.

As a followup to that days testing, on each device Lollipop and PIE I ran the command "cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness" to the get swappiness value.

Definition of swappiness below if interested:

Swappiness is the kernel parameter that defines how much (and how often) your Linux kernel will copy RAM contents to swap. This parameter's default value is “60” and it can take anything from “0” to “100”. The higher the value of the swappiness parameter, the more aggressively your kernel will swap.

For Lollipop it was 10, and for PIE is was set to 100 ( The max, most aggressive ) and if you look at the SWAP numbers for PIE during my tests that showed RAM was hovering around the critical value of 40 MG, you see that SWAP was used very little ( in screenshots for PIE you will see 51 MB, 65 MB, 218MB and 110 MB used out of a total of 1 GB of SWAP ) I would expect with a value of 100 for swappiness you would think it would use more to help out the RAM.

Notice and compare with the values for the LG Phone pics SWAP is used ( 459, 609 and 645 MB of SWAP out of 932 MB ) and the LG Phone even had more RAM than PIE.

So why is PIE with the "swappiness" value of 100 not doing the job of using more SWAP space, especially when its needed the most when RAM is hovering around the critical value?
[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
If you have Hangouts on one of your other Tablets, using APK Extractor to grab the apk and sideload it on the that one? Since I have opted to not flash Gapps anymore, I have a collection of my favorite apk's stored on my laptop. Once have have the Rom and SuperSU installed, I side load the apk's. If I find an app that I really want, I'll install it on my phone, grab it and email it to my TP. Or download it using one of several ways to download directly to your PC such as Raccoon, a web browser extension or websites.

Just for grins if you want to try something, reinstall WebOS and see how it behaves. I'm pretty confident that you have some obscure hardware issue. Could be something almost impossible to troubleshoot like a bad ribbon cable or faulty zif connector.

As a last resort, try removing and replacing the "Operator". :p Sorry, couldn't resist.

Smithy
[TouchPad General] middle_road:
Hehe, 'Loose Nut between Keyboard and Chair...'

I tried JCS's 5.1.1 last night on WhiteTape - it's acting weird... Play Store is taking forever to DL and install...

Only tried (5) apps, Root Explorer, Terminal, GMail, Firefox, and Brave. Brave will not even load a page, FF does though.

I downloaded Browmite, going to give that a try.

But first, I'm going to take all (4) of them and just flash 7.1.2 on to them.

Perhaps (2) without GApps and (2) with just to see. Sideload the apps I want and need.

I've got 4.4.4 - Milaq's and JCS's on (2) devices now but a couple of apps off of Play store didn't show up and I had to sideload previous versions anyway. And they're wonky trying to cast YouTube to the Roku.

I like to investigate updating the security patch level on the ROMs this winter.
[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
Man, how do you figure this stuff out? So what is the swappiness of your phone or CM11? Either something is wrong with Pie

and Lollipop code or they are just not meant to use Swap. How do you set this parameter?
[TouchPad General] DoubleStuff:
Well I tried to get the swappiness on my LG phone and I dont have root, so for now its unknown, but I can get KitKats swappiness, its 10 ( from my setup with SWAP and eXtreme settings ) which its the same as Lollipop.

When you open an app lets say Castbox, the app says to the Kernel, "Hey I need 200 MB of RAM" and Kernel says, "OK here it is", then you open RR3D and the app says to the Kernel, "Hey I need 400 MB of RAM" and Kernel says, "That much?, well I am going to have to find it first I only have 150 MB of RAM free, so I will have to SWAP things out, ...... OK, here is your 400 MB of RAM, have fun."

Kernel is this, for those who want the official definition: Not just the dialog like above.

A kernel in an operating system—in this case Android—is the component responsible for helping your applications communicate with your hardware. It manages the system resources, communicates with external devices when needed, and so on. Android uses a variation of the Linux kernel

Now it seems like in PIE the kernel is not working like it should, now you said maybe "Something is wrong with PIE or lollipop code", and thats my question too, but lets focus on PIE because it has swappiness of 100, Lollipop and KitKat has a value of 10, so with 10 its not expected to use SWAP that aggressively.

Is the Kernel part of the ROM? Or is it independent of it? I think its part of the ROM, because we never install

a zip called "the kernel".

Also to answer your question if we can set the swappiness parameter, and the answer is YES, remember HP_TOUCHPAD gave us something called "Universal Authority" zip file to load on our devices, also you can set it with the HP RAMDisk, remember I took those journeys to HP RAMdisk. Both can set the swappiness parameter. See below links for my journeys....

HP Ramdisk Journey

Universal Authority Journey

I have not changed the default of swappiness, I am curious why HP_TOUCHPAD set the default of KitKat to 10 but PIE to 100. Maybe he knows something??

Also one more thing I looked at the Kernel version of KitKat, Lollipop and PIE. See attached Pics.

KitKat, Lollipop has kernel 3.0 and PIE has 3.4. I wonder when 3.4 was implemented in our devices was it in Marshmallow?, Nougat? Because thats when things started to get sluggish.
[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
I was reading an article yesterday about the new Harmony OS from Huawei and they had included a really cool graphic of how the Android OS is structured. Of course I can't find it now. But I did find the attached. Does this help?

Smithy
[TouchPad General] DoubleStuff:
I see that you got that picture from wikipedia Android ( Operating System ), was it a good read? Maybe after watching some football games I will give it

a good read. Essentially the picture says that the Kernel is the base of the Android foundation. For example on top of the kernel base is build the libraries, API's, the framework and then the applications.

I am not trying to go that deep, I just want to know why Android PIE with swappiness set to 100, is not wanting to use SWAP when in RAM memory trouble.
[TouchPad General] smithylovestouchpad:
Yeah, it's a pretty good read. I know a lot more now about Android in general than I did before. I'm going to take a wild stab at what I think might be the issue with Lollipop and Pie. You are putting an extremely advanced OS on a very old tablet. The OS had to be heavily adapted to get it to work on that very old tablet. Which of those OS's don't have some kind of issues, mic, camera, Blue Tooth don't work. WiFi can be flaky. So why should we think that memory management should be any different? Now take KitKat. Very nicely adapted to the TouchPad by a very capable developer. Virtually everything works and obviously memory management does too. Good luck on your efforts.

Smithy
[TouchPad General] brockwitting:
Hello, I've booted the Live environment in VMWare Player, and connected the bricked (NOTHING ON THE SCREEN, but detected as Qualcomm device in Device Manager) touchpad via USB. VMWare Player sees the device as "Qualcomm QHSUSB_DLOAD." When I try to run C /Boot or WIPE ALL I get "unable to find device". Any ideas? The touchpad won't power up at all, but it is detected by Windows, so I hope it has some chance of not being a brick anymore. Thanks!
[TouchPad General] HP_TOUCHPAD:
How is the Tablet been charge?

Do you use the original HP charger?

The USB symbol or the triangle must be show on the screen to load anything to it.