5 replies to this topic

[SHADOW-XIII]

N1, CM 7.1 stable.

As many N1 users I was running out of space as I have now around 150 user apps installed on my phone (android market stat).
That's around 800MB-1GB of apps on SD card.

The problem I am facing is that often there's a failure on the phone (sd card) that causes freeze of the phone, that would not be that terrible if not following problem:

When I start my phone, all boots fine, it gets to screen I am able to operate, system loads sd apps but shortly after (max 5 minutes, usually 2-3) the screen freezes and phone is not responsive to any buttons. Pulling the battery is only way to get phone alive again but next time after boot it is all over again. Sometimes I have to do it more than 20 times being lucky if it stays alive at last. It does not matter what state I leave it, after boots it freezes (screen stays black/light as it was, animations frozen, all buttons including power are completely unresponsive).
The funny part - tethering works when phone is frozen (if I switched it on before the freeze obviously), trackball light is still pulsing.

I manage to identify that it's due to SD card:
- if I pull it out and boot the phone it works
- if I manage to activate USB, it will unmount card and it will work (but once I disable USB it's again the same!)
- it is happening nearly 100% probability when running out of SD card space (less than 1GB)
- if I delete some files on SD card (for example MP3 folder) it has higher chance of booting successfully and staying alive
- might be connected to large number of MP3 and couple thousands of small PNG images on my card (icons)

Tried on 2 SD cards:
- 16GB Transcend (class 10)
- 8GB Kingston
Both cards tested multiple times with various checks, including free space, even running fragmentation checks

At the beginning I thought it's my SD card (16gb that time) as the speed were very slow so I switched to 8GB.
No help, even after tweaking read sd cache so reading speed went up to 23MB/s (writing 6-7MB/s) it is still happening.


I am literally left clueless why this is happening will appreciate any tips how can I fix it or at least diagnose what exactly is the problem.

Edited by SHADOW-XIII, 16 December 2011 - 02:15 PM.

[samarium]

Connect you phone to USB.
Boot the phone
From the PC, run adb logcat as soon as possible.
You should get a log trace of what is going on on the phone.
Try it a few different times, try to look for similiarities.

[SHADOW-XIII]

Hi samarium

Thanks for help, I just had some time to sit around and play with it, after some time (plenty restarts ) I managed to clear our some apps that were throwing many errors into the logcat so it's better readable now.

I tried multiple times and it's all nearly exactly same, I just uninstalled few apps causing mess in logcat.
Whole logcat contains booting systems and me touching nothing at all, after I noticed logcat stopped growing tried unlock device and it was not responding anymore:

https://dl.dropbox.c..._final.zip?dl=1

Please if someone can tell me what's going on and how to fix it, I will appreciate!

Edited by SHADOW-XIII, 25 December 2011 - 09:08 PM.

[thisisAziz]

Do you use setcpu !? Cause I used to have almost same problem and it's gone by uninstalling setcpu

[PacoBell]

I'd recommend against using any class 10 card for anything2ext use, ESPECIALLY data. Class 10 is optimized for large sequential writes while something like a class 2 or 4 will handle the small writes that most apps use much faster. I know this from personal experience. Used to have a Kingston class 10 and it would constantly trigger the watchdog timer. With my new 32GB class 4, it still does that on occasion, but not nearly as much.

[SHADOW-XIII]

thisisAziz, on 10 January 2012 - 12:37 PM, said:

Do you use setcpu !? Cause I used to have almost same problem and it's gone by uninstalling setcpu

yes, the app, although as far as I remember I was testing it as one of first app to disable and it still wasn't working, might be problem with 2 apps conflicting each other but the closest I found was to disable LBE Privacy Guard. (still I keep setcpu disabled, might try more testing soon), but not 100% convinced as now it does not kill it all the time, usually only 1 time while before I could not get the phone running at all

PacoBell, on 14 January 2012 - 10:57 PM, said:

I'd recommend against using any class 10 card for anything2ext use, ESPECIALLY data. Class 10 is optimized for large sequential writes while something like a class 2 or 4 will handle the small writes that most apps use much faster. I know this from personal experience. Used to have a Kingston class 10 and it would constantly trigger the watchdog timer. With my new 32GB class 4, it still does that on occasion, but not nearly as much.

so if sdcard is slow the whole device should froze? that's no good, it is major android issue then.
Even if the problem is the slow sd card then still it should be loading but longer. (and I do not use sd-ext). I was playing with sd tool app to increase speed of the card and checking it with, don't tell me having 20mb/s+ reading speed isn't enough, this is clearly something else. Maybe someone can decipher the log I posted and see what's going on there ... what is that 'watchdog timer' you writing about? Is it the same what's killing my phone in this case?