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iPhone Tip: Speed up your iPhone without Restarting it.

TheSpaz

TheSpaz

macrumors 604
Original poster
Jun 20, 2005
7,032
1
If you're like me... you use your iPhone for more than just iPod.app. Did you ever notice that after a brand new update or a restart, your iPhone feels snappy again? Do you have to restart your iPhone every day to get it to feel this way again? Do you often force quit Safari?

Here's a tip that I've been using for quite a while and I wanted to share it with the lot of you. Here it goes:

To speed up your iPhone without having to quit Safari, just create a new blank web page, then close the web page you were viewing. Now you can leave Safari running and you'll notice a speed increase on launching other apps now. It's pretty cool.

I noticed that it's pretty much Safari that slows down the iPhone. Mail doesn't do much in the background (except for when it's checking mail) and iPod app uses hardly any memory when it's not playing music... so creating this new page is an easy way to free up some memory to speed things up a bit.

Like I said before, I've been using this trick for a while now and it's just as effective as force quitting Safari (which I do not like to do since it I feel weird for force quitting something that's not stuck or frozen).

There you have it. If you have any other tips on how to speed up your iPhone for a smoother experience, post them here. I'll post more if I think of some.
 
Vandam500 said:
Interesting indeed but does this really work?
Click to expand...

Try it for yourself. As soon as I create a new page and close the other one, my apps launch super fast. But, if I have a webpage open, it takes a few seconds. I hate it when I wanna text someone back in a hurry and SMS takes like 3 seconds to open when it should take 1 second. I prefer the 1 second. It doesn't sound like much but, when you're going back and forth between SMS and BeeJive and other apps, it gets frustrating quick.
 
Hmm.

My iPhone seems to act the exact same way after I do this.

Maybe it's just a placebo effect?
 
iphone OS , unlike windows mobile, doesn't leave any open apps running on the background, when you close them. That's why everybody is waiting for push notifications. So it is hardly unlikely that safari eats up memory, since when you leave it, it just closes. Nothing runs behind. That's the whole idea actually of why iphone OS is much better than windows mobile . It has NO task manager ( to manage tasks running on the background)

So I don't think that safari trick actually works. I've been doing it for a year now (because i always want a blank page when I open it) and I've seen no speed improvements.

The only RADICAL speed improbement that I saw was when I un-jailbroke it. Man it goes three times as fast.
 
darkmeton said:
iphone OS , unlike windows mobile, doesn't leave any open apps running on the background, when you close them. That's why everybody is waiting for push notifications. So it is hardly unlikely that safari eats up memory, since when you leave it, it just closes. Nothing runs behind. That's the whole idea actually of why iphone OS is much better than windows mobile . It has NO task manager ( to manage tasks running on the background)

So I don't think that safari trick actually works. I've been doing it for a year now (because i always want a blank page when I open it) and I've seen no speed improvements.

The only RADICAL speed improbement that I saw was when I un-jailbroke it. Man it goes three times as fast.
Click to expand...

Not true. There are currently 3 applications that run in the background: Safari, Mail and iPod. Trust me, if those were opened at any time, they stay running until you force quit them by holding home for 10 seconds.
 
there is NO way apps are running on the background. If mail was running thn why would we need push or fetch? When a mail would come we would be notified. Also you can see the keynote about the app store introduction. It clearly states that ALL apps close when you exit them ( except for music).
 
TheSpaz said:
Not true. There are currently 3 applications that run in the background: Safari, Mail and iPod. Trust me, if those were opened at any time, they stay running until you force quit them by holding home for 10 seconds.
Click to expand...

i thought this is a fact how come ppl are still arguing this? I guess nobody try doing anything else on the phone while listening to music :rolleyes:

I ever remember sum graphic intensive games recommending force shutting down safari and mail to increase the performance.
 
darkmeton said:
there is NO way apps are running on the background. If mail was running thn why would we need push or fetch? When a mail would come we would be notified. Also you can see the keynote about the app store introduction. It clearly states that ALL apps close when you exit them ( except for music).
Click to expand...

Sorry, but you're wrong.

Applications from the App Store are subject to this requirement (as well as being sandboxed). Other apps, such as those for the core functions of the phone (as well as some homebrew apps) are not.

MobileMusicPlayer, MobileMail, MobilePhone and MobileSafari can all remain running even when they're not displayed.

Also, just having your mail client running doesn't meant that it's actively connecting to your server and checking for mail. The fact that the app is running doesn't mean that its constantly checking for e-mail...
 
darkmeton said:
there is NO way apps are running on the background. If mail was running thn why would we need push or fetch? When a mail would come we would be notified. Also you can see the keynote about the app store introduction. It clearly states that ALL apps close when you exit them ( except for music).
Click to expand...

Oh my gosh! How exactly does Safari not quit when you close it? You can't deny what you can test. App Store apps are required to close, due to memory and battery management, but Mail, Safari, and iPod do run in the background. Let's stop arguing something that has undeniable facts, hmm? Get a life.
 
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Right. Next order of business?
 
ppc750fx said:
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Right. Next order of business?
Click to expand...

You are awesome! I thought everyone knew that Safari, Mail, iPod and Phone ran in the background... I guess not.

Also, I noticed that sometimes Maps runs in the background for a short time. If I find my location, and click home, then click back to Maps... it loads right up as if it never closed... Try it. I think it runs for at least a couple of minutes extra.
 
I definately noticed a difference in performance. I had several graphic intensive web pages open on my phone and when I tried this trick, I definately noticed my phone faster. I was having problems with the speed of replying in mail and it seems to have fixed itself.

Thanks for the great Tip...
 
jwilcox09 said:
I definately noticed a difference in performance. I had several graphic intensive web pages open on my phone and when I tried this trick, I definately noticed my phone faster. I was having problems with the speed of replying in mail and it seems to have fixed itself.

Thanks for the great Tip...
Click to expand...

You're welcome. It usually works for me too. Hey, I guess if only one other person benefits from this tip... so be it. I thought it was cool.
 
wackymacky said:
Why the blank page though? If you kill the app with the force-quit does'nt it free up the memory resources?
Click to expand...

I don't think force quitting is very good. I hate just stopping a process by killing it. I'd rather do it the right way.
 
TheSpaz said:
I don't think force quitting is very good. I hate just stopping a process by killing it. I'd rather do it the right way.
Click to expand...

What is the right way to fully close an app that runs in the background? As far as I know, killing it is the only way. Why do you have a phobia of doing this?
 
darkmeton said:
there is NO way apps are running on the background. If mail was running thn why would we need push or fetch? When a mail would come we would be notified. Also you can see the keynote about the app store introduction. It clearly states that ALL apps close when you exit them ( except for music).
Click to expand...

you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
 
bradenwh said:
What is the right way to fully close an app that runs in the background? As far as I know, killing it is the only way. Why do you have a phobia of doing this?
Click to expand...

Force-quitting by holding the home button is the equivalent of using 'kill -9'. I suppose if you're feeling nice, you could use the terminal to "just" kill it instead... :D

Besides, why kill it? There aren't any performance issues that I've encountered by leaving it open...
 
wackymacky said:
Why the blank page though? If you kill the app with the force-quit does'nt it free up the memory resources?
Click to expand...


Mobile Safari will attempt to hold whatever pages are still loaded in cache as long as possible. So if you have a non-blank page (or pages), it will continue to hold the cache for that page until the phone must free up additional resources for whatever task is at hand.

This is why often you can be looking at a page in Safari, and come back to it later without having to reload the page. However, there are times (usually after using a memory intensive app, or you've used several apps) when the page needs to completely re-load before you can see it.

There's actually a very good explination of all of this on daringfireball that was posted a few months ago, if you're interested in learning more (or learning from someone who's taken a whole lot more time to learn about it than me!)

<edit - here's the pertinant info>

The iPhone (and iPod Touch) only have 128 MB of RAM, and WebKit can use a lot of memory. When memory gets tight, the system sends low memory warnings to running applications, telling them to purge what they can. Eventually, the system will start forcing apps to quit in order to free more memory. That’s why sometimes when you relaunch Safari, it remembers the URLs, but has to reload the content for all of your open web pages — that’s what happens when Safari is asked to quit while it’s running in the background.
Click to expand...

taken from:

http://daringfireball.net/2008/10/in_the_background
 
Sorry to bring this thread back to life, but I made a new discovery. When you make a new page in Safari and close the old page and hit the home button... Safari actually QUITS completely. You know how I know? I downloaded and installed an App called Free Memory 1.4. It shows you all the running processes and when I close Safari on a blank page, it actually quits Safari. So essentially, you're getting the same results as force quitting Safari, but without actually having to force quit it.

Edit: I just hit 3,000 posts with this post.
 
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