[G1 Android Development] tsheeley:
Biffmod 2.1 Tweaking Tips - Updated: April 12, 2011

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April 12, 2011

I'm actively working on this post. You might find it saved in the middle of me doing a section - be patient and check back a little later to see if I've finished it. Chances are I either had to go to work, was home for lunch or went to bed.

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I'll be sharing my thoughts and tips here on tweaking BiffMod in order to get the most out of your battery life and a smooth user experience.

As always, use your favorite backup methods before doing anything major to your phone - just in case you don't like the results, or happen to screw something up.

This will be pretty much a constant work in progress as new tips & methods are discovered and tested.

Enjoy and good luck.

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Turn on JIT and switch to 18% CC instead of Swap

Yes, yes... I know JIT is defaulted to off, Swap is defaulted to on and the awesome devs on this amazing ROM recommend it keeping it that way... but, take a look at my benchmark tests and see for yourself. You can squeeze a whole 2 more MFLOPS out of Linpack with this simple switch. While that doesn't "sound" like it's a lot, it's a noticeable speed boost. (Read ezterry's opinion of the usage of JIT.)

Trim your startup time and widget list with Autostarts (AppBrain link)

Keep in mind, not everyone will have the same apps (obviously)... but you'll get the general idea fairly quickly of what you do and don't need... don't be afraid to experiment. I recommend either writing down the default states of everything or taking screenshots prior to changing anything - that way you don't forget what you did. To take screenshots - with your phone plugged into your computer, open up a command prompt and type "ddms". (Also check out Droid Explorer - it's pretty awesome.)

The very first thing you should do after Autostarts builds the app list is switch to the new "Group by application" view and then hit Menu and expand everything - it makes using it SO much easier. (Collapse the apps again as you finish with each one - it's a good way to keep track of where you are if you have to step away from it for a minute or three. Also, rotate into landscape - some of the events have long names that get cut off in portrait.)

Now that you've got the view a bit more user friendly, start scrolling through and begin turning off "widget updating" events for any widgets you don't plan on using. As your doing this, if there are any other events that feed data to the widget, those will also be disabled automatically. (This can cut out big chunks of events for things like Beautiful Widgets - there's no way you need them ALL.)

You'll also want to disable a couple things listed as "after startup"... here's some of the things I turned off.

Bluetooth Share (Don't have a bluetooth headset, and don't know anyone I'd want to share anything with)

Email (I don't use Exchange)

Messaging (No need for the stock app to start if your replacement app can handle SMS and MMS)

Quick Settings (It binds to a long press on your search and comes up just fine without the startup.)

Yahoo Mail (listed as just "Mail" with the obvious purple Yahoo icon.)

Play with all of the events in this way - if you're not sure of something, hit the " i " on the right side for a quick description of what it does.

After all your tweaking in Autostarts is done, reboot. Depending on what you disabled, you should at least see improved boot times and have a shorter widget list.

Give Android a hand with memory management with Auto Memory Manager (AppBrain link)

This had to be one of the best finds. AMM will help your phone kill off those apps you THINK you closed out of, but still left a little something lingering in the background. Gone are the days of opening a task manager and killing those "empty" apps every couple hours. Just set it and forget it. Here are the values that I'm currently using: 6, 8, 10, 12, 10, 250... they read top to bottom when you're in the app and can be set either by using the sliders or entered manually in the Advanced section from the menu.

You'll have to do a good amount of playing with this one. Put some thought into the apps you keep running in the background and scale your numbers to match those needs.

Turn off Animations, Vibrate and Move Ringtones into /system/media/audio

Turning off the animations (or setting them to fast) will help speed up app response time a little as well - it's a fair trade off though if you're more concerned about the speed of your phone over the prettiness. Turning off vibrate can help display the incoming call a whole ring faster too. (I personally tested this with my home phone.) You can also squeeze a little more speed out of the incoming call display time by moving your custom sounds to /system/media/audio. (I suggest using Root Explorer from the market or whatever your favorite file manager may be.)

Get the most processing power out of your CPU with SetCPU (AppBrain link)

This is another one of those set-it-and-forget-it apps.

For those that don't know, Biffmod comes packaged with a kernel that can be overclocked - SetCPU is by far the best way to manage that. Here are the settings that I personally use to get the most zip out of my phone with I'm using it and to also conserve battery when I'm not.

Main:

Min/Max: Both set to 595MHz (anything higher and you'll start to have issues, freeze up on occasion and need to yank the battery... and no one wants that. Ezterry notes that in some rare cases 595MHz can cause issues as well. Bring it down a notch if this is you.)

Scaling: interactive

Set on Boot: on

Profiles:

Temp > 50 C (122 F):

Min/Max: Both set to 122MHz (I've found that 122MHz is a tad unstable at times, if this is you too, bring it up to 176MHz instead.)

Governor: interactive

Priority: 100

Battery < 15%:

Min: 122MHz - Max: 245MHz

Governor: interactive

Priority: 75

Screen Off:

Min: 122MHz - Max: 595MHz

Governor: interactive

Priority: 50

More to come later.

In the next update, I'll go into automating maintenance tasks and hands free backup syncing. :cool:

Happy tweaking!

.