Why is my phone slowing to a crawl?

[AC Question]

Hello everyone! I'm an infrequent guest here, and I tried to search for an answer to my question but couldn't find anything.

I'm having a hell of a time with my 5X.

I love the phone when it works, but I'm constantly getting HORRIBLE slowdowns with it. It'll get to the point where I can barely unlock the phone. I'll try to close apps but the app switcher will take 30 seconds to launch, and then won't respond to swipes for 10 seconds or more at a time.

The worst symptom of my problem is my camera, which is essentially useless when it comes to taking photos of my toddler. I'll double-tap the power button and feel the vibration feedback immediately, then wait about 5 seconds for the screen to turn on and get a feed from the camera, then it'll take another 5-20 seconds for the shutter button to get that blue ring that means it's ready to snap a picture. And forget about swiping to video mode, which often crashes the entire camera app.

This is madness. Fortunately there's usually one decent solution: restart. But that's not a good ongoing solution. After a restart, it's usually less than 48 hours before the phone is unusable again.

Do you kind folks have any ideas? I don't know what app might be causing this, if it's an app. I've tried uninstalling as many non-essential apps as I can, but I don't have a clue what might be running in the background, and it looks like Marshmallow took the ability to see that in settings away.

Please help!

 

[nahoku]

To isolate if an app is causing the problem, start the phone in Safe Mode. Safe mode will only load the OS and phone apps and no apps you installed yourself. If your phone works in Safe mode, then you will need to identify the app that's causing the problem by uninstalling them 1 by 1. As a guess, have you installed any app associated with the camera or dialer? Might be one of those. Also, if a file somewhere is corrupted, your phone may be stuck trying to sync it. You might try disabling all sync to see if that might be causing a slow down.

 

[scottysize]

No way I'd wait until the phone is doing what it's doing. I'd FDR it.

 

[cdubb1]

This is the 2nd time I'll say this today...it truly sounds to me like this phone just needs to be restarted once per day. It is not hard. My goodness does no one have 30 seconds to restart a phone?

 

[aysiu]

What worked for me was doing a full factory reset (yes, I know it's a pain, but it made a world of difference) and then (this is the important part) choosing not to automatically restore backed up data from Google's servers. No lag switching apps, almost no lag with the camera.

Manually backing up and resetting and redoing all your settings will take several hours of your time, but I think you'll notice the difference.

 

[aysiu]

This is the 2nd time I'll say this today...it truly sounds to me like this phone just needs to be restarted once per day. It is not hard. My goodness does no one have 30 seconds to restart a phone?

When your Nexus 5x is acting this way, a reboot "fixes" it for only a few minutes or maybe an hour, and then it goes back. And a reboot doesn't take 30 seconds.

 

[Crashdamage]

No offense but rebooting every day is not a fix and a reset should be a last resort. Some simple troubleshooting should find the problem.

It's easy to do some basic analysis. A reboot into safe mode is one way to start and often recommended but that's going about it backwards to me. It's also time consuming. For troubleshooting I want to have the device running not in safe mode, but normal operation and in the distressed condition. Why? Because you can't find a problem when it's not present.

There's some good tools available that don't require root permissions. For troubleshooting some users like OS Monitor:

https://forums.androidcentral.com/e...tails?id=com.eolwral.osmonitor&token=0DAsn2si

I like and.use OS Monitor, but I usually advise installing System Panel for its user-friendly UI.

https://forums.androidcentral.com/e...details?id=nextapp.systempanel&token=Q41Dt5YP

System Panel makes basic trouble shooting of a sluggish device simple. I look for poorly coded apps causing trouble first. The opening screen gives the basic information you need. For more details about a process just tap on the title bar.

With the phone at idle check CPU and RAM memory usage (pie charts upper left corner). Normally, CPU should be less than 5-10%. CPU clock speed (top horizontal bar) varies but should be something less than max.

RAM usage should be about 70-85%, unless you have recently rebooted and not yet opened apps to load RAM. You want to check these values after a fresh reboot, after some normal usage and when the tablet has slowed.

If CPU is high, look at the app list on the same screen. Check the CPU usage for each app (small vertical bar on left edge, next to app icons) for offenders.

If RAM usage is too high check for an app that may not have closed or cached properly and is holding RAM.

If something looks questionable you can try long-pressing on it and select 'End Task'. If you select a required system process, no worry, it will just restart. If CPU or RAM usage returns to normal and/or the tablet feels faster, that could be the offender.

Troubleshooting beyond this gets more complicated, but what is outlined above will find most problems causing sluggish performance.

 

[aysiu]

No offense but rebooting every day is not a fix and a reset should be a last resort.

Believe me—it was my last resort. I was dealing with lag for months (got this phone in October, and didn't factory reset until just this past week). I did all the usual stuff, trying to find problematic apps, checking RAM, etc. I'm only advising it because it worked for me, and the usual easy stuff did not (that includes wiping the cache partition).

 

[landale]

I also just restart every morning when I wake up. It's ridiculous that I have to do this on a modern smartphone but it solves all of my lag issues.

I didn't have this issue on my 6P but it was too big for me so ultimately had to settle for the 5X. I don't think it's a RAM issue as my Moto X had 2GB and I never had lag like this on it. I think it's a kernel issue as many rooted users have stated using a custom kernel solves the issue for them. I just don't want to deal with hacking my phone anymore.

I did a factory reset with no restore two months ago and that only fixed the problem for a week or two before the lag returned and camera became unusably slow.

 

[Crashdamage]

I would bet you have a problem app. You should try to identify it by following the procedure in my post #7.

Android since v1.0. Linux user since 2001.

 

[aysiu]

I did a factory reset with no restore two months ago and that only fixed the problem for a week or two before the lag returned and camera became unusably slow.

This is depressing to read. I recently did a factory reset with no restore, and it's been going great. I hope the lag doesn't return in a couple of weeks...

 

[gtg465x]

This is the 2nd time I'll say this today...it truly sounds to me like this phone just needs to be restarted once per day. It is not hard. My goodness does no one have 30 seconds to restart a phone?

It doesn't though. Haven't restarted mine for 170 hours now and I'm not seeing any slowdown. If you are having to restart every day, it's not a huge deal, but there must be an app slowly eating more and more of your memory and killing performance or something. I'm completely stock by the way.

Also FYI, I always factory reset first thing when I buy a new phone and set everything up fresh the first time. I did that with the Nexus 5X and have never had a problem with performance. Had the phone since it first came out.

 

[Dignan17]

I'm the OP (forgot to log in when I posted it) and I just wanted to follow up on this.

At some point last week my 5X started acting seriously wonky. I could no longer access the quick settings shade. Bluetooth didn't work. Notifications stopped. The App switcher was inaccessible. My phone was borked. Restarting it didn't help, and the phone showed the same exact behavior in safe mode, so it wasn't an app doing it.

At this point, Google phone support's only suggestion was to reset the phone, and I finally gave in to this idea. It was a serious PITA, but I got everything back up and running. I followed the advice in this thread and did not have Google restore my previous settings. I agree with that poster that this seems to be the key.

Now, it's still early after the reset and these problems could return, but for now everything seems good, and I'm noticing other weird things, like my keyboard is different. I don't know what that means. I've always used the default Android keyboard, but the one I have after the reset is slightly different than the one before. It's weird.

Anyway, I'll let you know if anything else comes of this...

 

[Stalonage]

Keyboard could be the newer one? I believe the Google keyboard was updated recently?

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[silversword411]

Thx Crashdamage for actual technical information instead of the regular "wipe the phone and it'll be faster" nonsense troubleshooting. The recommended app (now at v2), actually has an easy walk thru on enabling abd debugging to get to the info I've been hunting for...for months. Now if I could only get a historical 2 week log of apps, and when they query location data and I'll be in Android heaven.