Image Source: ehow.com
The iPhone is a powerful device, running a very powerful mobile operating system. There are over 35,000 apps for the iPhone by now – and many of them offer stunning graphics, effects, and sheer power on a smartphone device.
So it’s hard for some people – cough, like me – to admit that the powerful, wonderful iPhone sometimes needs a little help getting through the day. One way to do this – and to help your iPhone get a fresh start on free memory (of the RAM variety, the kind programs use to run, not storage memory) – is to get in the habit of restarting the iPhone once per day.
I have to say, it’s taken me a long while to admit this, to give in and help the iPhone out with a daily reboot. I think I had a bit of a pride thing (on behalf of the iPhone OS) going on – and did not want to concede that this was really necessary.
I’m on board now though. Lately, – especially since moving to the iPhone OS 3.0 betas – I’ve just seen that performance suffers noticeably when I let the phone go a few days without a restart. There are more brief freeze-ups within apps, more crashes, and a little more latency in certain apps. I use the excellent Free Memory app to help in this area – but not enough to forego the daily reboot.
I’m hoping by the time 3.0 has its public release, memory management will be better – in both the OS itself and within apps. I also cannot wait to see Force Quit come back in one of these betas – although I’m still holding out a faint hope that its absence might mean Apple are cooking up something better for memory / processes management …
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
{ 1 trackback }
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
cheers to that, Patrick. I can still go for quite a few days or weeks without a reboot, though. It's really surprising considering how many apps I play around with.
I've been able to go weeks without power cycling but eventually it freezes and it always happens when I need it the most. I think I'll start this power cycle-a-day habit as suggested.
btw: I'm still not sure why this even happens. I know the phone is strapped for memory but if an app is running and memory becomes too low it gets killed and recovers the memory space. Being that Apple handles all the other memory management for any of their apps & background processes, I would think that as long as they do not have many memory leaks the OS should be fine.
It's nice to see I'm not the only iPhone user who's gotten in the habit of a daily reboot. I have a decent amount of apps installed (not a ton, but about 3 pages worth), and I definitely notice a slowdown and more glitches after a couple days if I don't reboot it. I think many people assume the iPhone is “just another cell phone” and don't realize that it's essentially a small form factor Mac computer. With a daily restart, one can realize the best performance and stability from these amazing devices.
I've been restarting mine also. One thing that I really miss from WM was the ability to have the phone restart itself daily, at a time of my choosing. That way, when I got up for the day, I had a “fresh” load.
Rags, aflorence, Josh – I have definitely gone longer periods as well, but my impression (have not attempted to quantify yet) wit 3.0 is that memory management is weaker, or is having some issues – so when I've gone longer times between reboots the feeling of 'less than optimal' performance is stronger.
ssschmidt – I never really used that feature in all my years of WM usage, though I did like scheduled backups a lot
Interesting. Thanks for that Patrick.
I find it worrying that the beta release rate has increased as we approach the official launch and the memory issue hasn't been tackled….
shedali – good point. I hope we will see improvement soon, and just maybe a force quit replacement that offers more
I notice the picture you chose for this post shows a user executing a hard reset. That technique should only be used when the phone is, in fact, frozen. Constant hard resets can cause problems in the long run. For a daily reboot (which is a GREAT idea, by the way) it's better to use the regular power cycle technique: press and hold the power button until the “slide to power off” screen appears.
Timothy – very good point. Hard resets are definitely an 'only when necessary' procedure, not suitable at all for daily restarts …
Timothy – very good point. Hard resets are definitely an 'only when necessary' procedure, not suitable at all for daily restarts …
You must log in to post a comment.