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Gradual Slowing Down of Iphone

G

gmagnes

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 23, 2008
63
0
I've had my Iphone 3G with 16GB of storage for a little less than two years. I've noticed a gradual slowing down of how long it takes for programs to open and to a lesser extent, to process input. The opening can be particularly frustrating when you're trying to enter a note and get a phone number quickly to convey the information to someone or record some information. I have about 105 programs currently installed and 6.4 GB of video (getting ready for airplane viewing on a trip), 5.22 GB of audio, 840 MB of programs, and 1.82 GB free in a 16GB device. I use it mostly for productivity applications (e.g., ToDo, Groups Contacts, Quicksheet, HandBase, etc) plus some web stuff (ebay, amazon, kindle, NYTimes, Pandora, Instapaper, etc.).

I tried timing the time it takes to open ToDo and Awesome Notes, and of course, today they came up pretty quickly (maybe 4-5 seconds). Normally I think it takes several seconds longer. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I might do to speed things up a bit. It seems like it was much faster when I first got it. Would cutting back on what I've stored on the hard drive help?
I'm also thinking of upgrading when OS 4.0 comes out to get the mulitasking and access to a blue tooth keyboard. Would upgrading to a 3GS or whatever new device is available in the summer(assuming it's as fast as the 3GS) likely make much of a difference in overall speed?

Thanks
Gerry
 
If you dont care much for your saved data like SMS, then try to restore the firmware and set up as new iPhone. This should bring it back to factory speeds. The amount of data should not matter. Before that though, try 'reset all settings' under settings>general>reset and see of that makes any difference.

The 3GS (or the new iPhone) will definitely be faster (I cant stand my 3G's speed now after getting used to the 3GS)
 
Rebooting is a good way to speed stuff up.

Or jailbreak and get SBSettings - it tells you what you have running in the background (Mail, iPod, and other Apple native apps have a habit of starting up in the background all the time) and then you can quickly stop the ones you want to stop and free up some memory.

There used to be some apps that freed up memory but Apple cleared them all out - I think because they forced the resident apps to crash, generating useless crash reports that got sent to apple.
 
I am sure you probably have rebooted recently. If that's the case

Sync with iTunes to backup data
Restore firmware
Resync to get your data back

mreddys10 said:
If you dont care much for your saved data like SMS, then try to restore the firmware and set up as new iPhone. This should bring it back to factory speeds. The amount of data should not matter. Before that though, try 'reset all settings' under settings>general>reset and see of that makes any difference.

The 3GS (or the new iPhone) will definitely be faster (I cant stand my 3G's speed now after getting used to the 3GS)
Click to expand...

SYNC with iTunes backs up the data and app.
 
You can restore from a backup, but if you really want to get things back to how they were originally, you'll need to restore and setup as new. Either that or reset all settings, which has been shown to make things more snappy.
 
I've been having this same problem. Most annoying is that apps stutter when opening, and open slower than they did when I first got it. I have a 32 gb 3GS that's got 9.6 gb of space left on it. I've just done a restore as new, then I synced all my stuff back to it, but it doesn't really seem to have helped. This is getting kinda old. There's never been any damage of any kind to this phone. Should I call Apple? Beginning to be glad I bought the apple care...
 
Try turning off as many services as possible. Eg location services, push notifications, bluetooth (if you don't use it), etc.

Do you have any mail accounts set up? It will run mail checking in the background. Try setting all mail checking to be manual only (but on my phone it still starts up Mail in the background at odd intervals)
 
RedTomato said:
Try turning off as many services as possible. Eg location services, push notifications, bluetooth (if you don't use it), etc.

Do you have any mail accounts set up? It will run mail checking in the background. Try setting all mail checking to be manual only (but on my phone it still starts up Mail in the background at odd intervals)
Click to expand...

Yea, that should work. Even my phone starts Mail and iPod after every restart, and just sits there in the background. Another BIG memory hog is Safari. The best way to exit safari completely is to close ALL tabs (including the last one) until the page title says 'Untitled'
 
Maybe it's slow because of all the stuff you have on it. Try deleting thing on the iPHone you dont want anymore.
 
Same thing had happened to me when i had been on 3.0 but when i restored my iPhone it had speed up substantially
 
Problem is, I use location services and push, so I need to leave those on. I never use bluetooth, so I leave that off. I've deleted a great number of apps, I try to keep only what I'm actively using more than once a week. But, it's still kinda slow and stutters when opening apps. I've done a restore, it didn't help at all. I always keep the safari browser clear when not using it. Seriously, I don't believe I'm doing anything that could possibly tax the resources of my iPhone, and yet it's still slow and stuttering when opening the apps. It's seriously driving me nuts.
 
Use SSH and the 'top' command to see what processes are running on your iPhone, how much CPU they are using and also their memory usage.
 
hushmartin said:
Problem is, I use location services and push, so I need to leave those on. I never use bluetooth, so I leave that off. I've deleted a great number of apps, I try to keep only what I'm actively using more than once a week. But, it's still kinda slow and stutters when opening apps. I've done a restore, it didn't help at all. I always keep the safari browser clear when not using it. Seriously, I don't believe I'm doing anything that could possibly tax the resources of my iPhone, and yet it's still slow and stuttering when opening the apps. It's seriously driving me nuts.
Click to expand...

Do you have an account set up in the iphone Mail.app? That will activate itself in the background at various intervals. Also iPod will continue running in the background if you listen to anything or watch a video, even in a game or other app that you've since quit.
 
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