Comments on: A Restart a Day Keeps iPhone Memory Headaches At Bay

By: patrickj

patrickj — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:37:53 +0000

Timothy – very good point. Hard resets are definitely an 'only when necessary' procedure, not suitable at all for daily restarts …

By: patrickj

patrickj — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:36:53 +0000

Timothy – very good point. Hard resets are definitely an 'only when necessary' procedure, not suitable at all for daily restarts …

By: Timothy Sanford Hankins

Timothy Sanford Hankins — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:57:00 +0000

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.

By: patrickj

patrickj — Sun, 10 May 2009 17:30:48 +0000

shedali – good point. I hope we will see improvement soon, and just maybe a force quit replacement that offers more 🙂

By: shedali

shedali — Sun, 10 May 2009 01:51:49 +0000

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….

By: facebook-601728539

facebook-601728539 — Sat, 09 May 2009 19:13:20 +0000

Interesting. Thanks for that Patrick.

By: Bookmarks for May 8th through May 9th | Donovan’s Brain

Bookmarks for May 8th through May 9th | Donovan’s Brain — Sat, 09 May 2009 17:07:11 +0000

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By: patrickj

patrickj — Sat, 09 May 2009 12:14:48 +0000

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 🙂

By: ssschmidt

ssschmidt — Sat, 09 May 2009 10:50:37 +0000

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.

By: Josh Gard

Josh Gard — Sat, 09 May 2009 06:00:37 +0000

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.

By: aflorence

aflorence — Sat, 09 May 2009 05:56:45 +0000

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.