Improve the memory/CPU usage of Locale 1.0
When I first tried Locale beta around 8 months ago, it was a CPU/battery hog (although the CPU thing was exacerbated by Cupcake having such poor GUI thread response, and the background sync killing the device). Locale just made it much worse. Over the last 6 months Locale's been optimised and tweaked and in the last 2 months it's barely affected how the device runs - which is most excellent.
Unfortunately, with the rewrite with 1.0 we're back to square one. Since I installed 1.0, my device's response time has been noticeably slower, and in the last 6 hours Locale 1.0 used 14% (yes - fourteen!) percent of my battery usage. Given that I've been using my phone to read RSS (with NewsRob) and email people all afternoon (both of which show as using less than 6% of battery usage) it demonstrates that whatever Locale is doing, it's not doing it very efficiently. I suspect the prime reason is this daft 'foreground' state with the notification, which means Locale is consuming CPU and battery constantly, rather than being put to sleep by the OS when no state changes are occurring.
This is a total show-stopper for me, and combined with the annoyance of the constant notification, I've uninstalled and refunded. I'll keep an eye on the comments and this board and see if/when matters improve, but I suspect I'm not going to shell out $10 of my hard-earned until the app is at least as good as (or better than) the free beta. If you're going to charge that much, you need to have a seriously polished app, and 1.0 is nowhere near, yet. It seems odd to have a long free beta, get the app stable and performant (and working well) and then completely rewrite it from scratch, and then start selling what is effectively a new beta at a very high price-point relative to other apps in the market.
Carter, can you clarify when the beta will expire / stop functioning, so those of us who are continuing to use it will know when to expect it to stop? I remember seeing it written somewhere but can't find any reference on the website etc now.
As I say, I'll keep an eye on the state of the project, I look forward to when Locale 1.0 comes out of beta and is back to the quality the beta was at before it stopped being free!!!
webreaper
shared this idea
Locale 1.1 offers significantly improved battery life, with 20-50% battery life improvement depending on the handset.
Locale 1.1’s battery usage is also about 30% better than Locale beta.
11 comments
-
AdminCarter
(Admin, two forty four a.m.)
commented
@marnoldster: This is a question that should be directed to locale-support. Locale 1.0 offers significantly improved performance over the beta, so there is likely something peculiar to your setup.
-
marnoldster
commented
I have exactly the same story as webreaper.
I had the beta until very recently - it continued to run in the background even after expired (I had not idea it had.) Recently I opened it to make a tweak, and I couldn't.
I couldn't imagine going day to day without locale any more so I purchased the upgrade. With the plugins I also needed to buy, it ended up costing me around $15.
It, unfortunately, took me more than 24hrs to work out that the new locale was completely halting my system. It become totally un-usable due to CPU hogging. I was surprised, I didn't look at Locale at first because the beta had been completely invisible and "just worked."
I have disabled Locale, unfortunately I can't refund (because if I could I would -- that says a lot when you consider at the start of my comment I state "I couldn't imagine living without it") but for the last 4 hours since disabling it I have my phone back. It actually works. All the applications I uninstalled to try and track down my problem I can have reinstalled and running again. Not that they worked before anyway, because Locale was hogging the CPU and everything was being killed by Android making my whole phone in general highly unstable.
Now, this is largely the fault of the weak CPU in the HTC Magic, I'm sure, but the Beta worked fine. I'm not even concerned about battery life at all, but Locale makes my system very unstable due to CPU hogging.
I'd be happy to test for you in some fashion, since I'd love to see it fixed, and I'm stuck with the program now it's been more than 24hrs.
-
janiskfp
commented
Yeah, the Beta was better for me, too, battery wise. I'm running a G1 with whatever the current CyanogenMod is. I'm not sure if it's the Wifi checks or what, but my head-to-head comparison of the two came out to about 2:1 paid to Beta, from what I could gather (frankly, I don't remember what I did, but I ended up opting for some of the new plugins instead of speed of location detection and battery life. I also disabled/unistalled a few other always running services, which made up for a hunk of that difference.)
-
webreaper
commented
I'm removing my votes from these items, as they're no longer of interest to me. Locale has managed to price itself out of the market and has reduced or compromised the feature-set to the point of spoiling what was an excellent application.
I've found that with FoxyRing, Power manager and Y5 I can manage all the functionality that Locale provided me previously, and now the beta has been killed I'll not be using Locale any more.
I'll keep an eye out for updates and progress in future, but I think it's a real shame as it used to be an excellent app.
-
crunchyspider
commented
At roughly $10 I was surprised at the cost of locale. I'm sure you've heard other negative comments about locale, but I stopped using the beta and finally moved to the pay version. I get to the pay version only to find out that there is no way to transfer the data and that there are horrible delay issues. I have substantial drop in responsiveness from my G1 when locale is enabled. I view this as a horrible step backwards for this wonderful software and will be uninstalling locale until I see comments reflecting positive improvement of locale and this issue resolved. I am very disappointed in locale's progression.
-
AdminCarter
(Admin, two forty four a.m.)
commented
Great, thanks for letting me know!
-
jaime.mj
commented
I have installed the Official ROM from Vodafone (Android 1.6) and Locale seems works better. Thanks Carter!
-
AdminCarter
(Admin, two forty four a.m.)
commented
@jaime: These reboots are probably due to the non-standard ROMs. Although the problem might go away when Locale is disabled, that's usually just because Locale is tickling a bug in the ROM itself. I've got two G1s, a Hero, and a Droid stress testing Locale and I haven't seen a single reboot in months. You might consider reverting to a standard Android ROM, which could resolve other quirky behavior on your phone as well.
If you have the Android developer tools installed, Locale will emit stacktraces if the app crashes. A reboot indicates a problem in Android itself, so there probably won't be any stacktraces.
-
jaime.mj
commented
Hi,
I have detected some CPU issues with Locale 1.0 in my HTC Magic too. The system boot is very slow when Locale 1.0 is enabled but if it's not, the boot is sensibly faster. Moreover, Locale 1.0 sometimes hangs my mobile and the system freezes when somebody calls me. I could provide us a trace or similar if there was a debug mode in Android or Locale. I noted this issue in Dwang ROM (Android 1.6) and Superatmel AOSP ROM (Android 1.6 with some 2.0 components).
-
webreaper
commented
Well, I'm using Donut, and the battery/CPU monitor that the OS provides showed me that in the first 6-7 hours of installing Locale 1.0, it used 14% of my device's battery. Whereas the I just checked and the Locale Beta doesn't even register at all on the battery monitor for the last 6 hours today (and I've been using both in an almost identical situation). My actual battery level backed this up. So I'd have to disagree with your claim of "significant" performance and battery life improvements.
I'd like to provide more info to you on this, e.g., logs, more anecdotal evidence, etc, but there's no way I'm paying $10 to provide you test data. This is why you should provide a beta of 1.0.
As I mentioned above, I'm fairly convinced that half the problem is that by forcing Locale to be a foreground app with the notification, Android can't close/sleep the process, which means it just sits there chewing up CPU cycles and battery power.
-
AdminCarter
(Admin, two forty four a.m.)
commented
Locale 1.0 offers *significant* performance and battery life improvements over the beta.
If you've isolated a specific performance issue, please let us know so that it can be fixed.
