iPod touch iOS4 Slow On iPod Touch 2G Because Of Background Apps?

[kkrizka]

Hello,

I've recently upgraded my iPod Touch 2G to iOS4, and it feels much slower to me. I've seen people complaining about that in other threads (iPhone 3G too).

One idea that I had while playing around with the OS is that maybe the new multitasking feature is making it slow. From what I understand, iOS4 saves the memory image of any previously launched applications in the background. My understanding was that it saves the image to disk. However, some experimenting makes me think that the image stays in the memory. Which as a result makes less memory available to other apps.

I only did a quick test to check this hypothesis, so I might as well be wrong. I'll be doing more "scientific" tests this evening. But in the meantime, let me know what you think.

So far, this is what I did. I launched a random application, closed it by clicking the home button, launched another application, closed it by clicking the home button.... you get the idea. Then from the home screen, I checked the amount of available memory using SBSettings (I have a jailbroken iOS4). After launching 11 apps (Facebook, Twitter, Safari, Mail, cardmath24, Cydia, iTunes, AC-130, App Store, iBooks) I have 10MB of memory available.

Then I kill all of the apps. I do this by double clicking the home button, so the app switched pops up, holding down an icon in the app switcher so it goes into edit mode and pressing the red "stop" button in the corner of each app. As a result, I have 43 MB of available memory and the OS seems a bit more responsive.

But the responsiveness might just be a placebo effect. I plan to do a real test this evening. I plan to write a simple app that calculates the first few prime numbers using a brute force algorithm. Then I want to see how long it takes to do this if I have launched a lot of apps in the background and if I have not.

What do you guys think? Is there an already existing app that is designed to measure the performance of iOS?

 

[Xavier]

That is because iOS4 is only partially functional on the iPod Touch 2nd generation. If you what more reliable background apps, just revert to 3.1.3, jailbreak, and download 'backgrounder'.

 

[liamkp]

You could jailbreak with redsn0w and get winterboard.

 

[kkrizka]

That is because iOS4 is only partially functional on the iPod Touch 2nd generation. If you what more reliable background apps, just revert to 3.1.3, jailbreak, and download 'backgrounder'.

Ah, for some reason I missed the fact that multitasking isn't available for iPod Touch 2G in all the announcements I read, and I didn't really look in detail at the options redsn0w. Reading other articles now seems to indicate that the reason iPod Touch 2G does not officially have multitasking is the low amount of memory available.

As for Backgrounder, I've used it with 3.1.3 before I upgraded to iOS4. It works pretty well. I would prefer to use the official Apple multi-tasking, since I imagine that it would work better with apps since they are designed with it in mind. But I'm quite sure many will argue otherwise.. For now, I'll just wait and see if they upgrade Background to work with iOS4.

You could jailbreak with redsn0w and get winterboard.

As far as I understand, winterboard is only for theming your iPod/iPhone (please correct me if I am wrong). I don't really care about the new background in the home screen.

 

[celticpride678]

As far as I understand, winterboard is only for theming your iPod/iPhone (please correct me if I am wrong). I don't really care about the new background in the home screen.

No, you can setup user wallpapers on WinterBoard (but it isn't working on iOS 4 yet).

 

[blackNBUK]

Ah, for some reason I missed the fact that multitasking isn't available for iPod Touch 2G in all the announcements I read, and I didn't really look in detail at the options redsn0w. Reading other articles now seems to indicate that the reason iPod Touch 2G does not officially have multitasking is the low amount of memory available.

You may have been right the first time

This thread got me interested enough to check out jailbreaking the iPod Touch 2G, and it appears that redsn0w can enable iOS4 multitasking on the 2G iPod Touch. The current version provides an option while older versions always enabled multitasking. It should be easy to enough to prove whether it's working or not; start an App that takes an appreciable time to load, leave it and then start it again. The second time round should load much faster.

Benchmarking your iPod to tell whether it is really running slower or not is an interesting idea. However I'm not sure whether calculating primes is the best way of doing this. At a guess this will mostly measure the performance of your CPU when what you really want to know is how iOS4 responds to allocating memory when there is little left. I think I would approach the problem from the other direction by running logging tools in the background while using the iPod as normal. On a desktop I would use things like top, vmstat and iostat to do this; I've got no idea whether they are usable on iOS.

 

[TechNickL]

proof

I have an un-jailbroken ipod touch 2g. I often play the game call of duty: world at war: zombies. This game uses heavy 3d rendering and multiple ai scripts. When i turn my ipod on, it will run, provided i don't run any other apps first. As soon as I do, it stops working until I reset my iPod touch. I didn't have this problem with iOS 3.1.3 but I am with 4.0, leading me to believe that if it has no multitasking, it must at least leave apps running at some stage.

 

[MCRunning]

I find it also lags on my 2g touch. I am going to probably downgrade back to 3.13 cause there isn't any real need for me to have 4g. Only thing I miss out on is folders