Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Recently, the old man at home often complains to me that the mobile phone is inexplicably reminded that the capacity is not enough, and the battery is not durable. In the past, I focused my attention on the flagship machine, but paid little attention to the thousand yuan machine. Recently, I checked and found that although the thousand-yuan machine is different from the flagship machine in terms of photo taking, processor, and the width of the black edge of the chin, it is not much different from the flagship machine in terms of "storage". The running memory basically starts with 6GB, and the storage capacity has also risen to 128GB, which is consistent with the entry hardware specifications of most domestic manufacturers.

Before the new phone arrived, when I made room for my family to clean the phone, I found that even the red rice K20 three years ago had no obvious stutter except that the storage was full, and even such an "old phone" was updated after a major version of the system. added the "memory expansion" option to improve the fluency of the system.

Similarly, Xiaomi and Huawei both updated through OTA some time ago, adding some new features about "storage".

Xiaomi and Huawei optimized and improved "storage" almost at the same time: for example, Xiaomi made a series of upgrades around "storage" for its flagship Xiaomi 12s lzh, such as adding memory space expansion ability, optimizing system core scene fluency, and optimizing system resource scheduling ability, in order to minimize system stutters and improve fluency.

Although Huawei did not write about running memory, it did update an important feature: space storage compression technology.

Although it sounds like a mouthful, in fact, to put it simply, the system automatically "check duplicates and remove duplicates" function, extract important documents and keep a separate copy, and delete redundant duplicate files to save storage space.

The two companies do not seem to be close to each other, one of the main operation is running memory (RAM), the other is read-only memory (ROM), but in the end they achieve the same goal.

All through the "storage" optimization, to improve the fluency of the application system, as well as the application file reading speed.

Temporarily solved the problem of fluency, but here comes a new problem. Although many versions of domestic Android phones have been upgraded to Android 12, will they not be as fluent as iOS after a period of use?

In fact, if we want to discuss this issue in depth, it will be a new topic.

To put it simply, on the one hand, it is the system's "own reason". In the final analysis, it is because the operating mechanism of Android is different from that of iOS. No matter how Android is upgraded, it can not get rid of the running mechanism of the virtual machine, while iOS runs with sandboxie.

For example, the working principle of Android can be understood as that a classmate is an App and the classroom is a virtual machine. A student can finish his homework quickly in the classroom, but when more and more students (App) enter the classroom (virtual machine), they will whisper or even interfere with each other, which will reduce the efficiency of homework. The Apple sandboxie mechanism can be understood as each student occupies a separate classroom, then the efficiency of completing homework can be imagined.

If Android wants to improve system fluency, expanding storage space is the most effective way.

On the other hand, due to the lack of effective supervision of Android software, the installation of Android software will not only stay in memory, but also go into a variety of "joint launches", which is simply a backstage party.

On the other hand, the iOS system will strictly monitor the self-startup of the software, so that when it develops to iOS 16, there will be additional notice for pasting between applications, which realizes real-time monitoring and startup restrictions for third-party software.

What is the actual effect of the "depth" optimization of limited running memory and storage space? I believe this is the focus of most users. I happen to have Xiaomi 12s Ultra and Huawei Mate 50 on hand.

After updating Xiaomi 12SU to the latest system, apart from expanding 3GB memory, there is no separate option for "memory space scalability" in the settings, but you can clearly feel the improvement in fluency and response speed after the update.

You can clearly feel the silky and smooth hand when you swipe the screen.

There is no sense of stickiness when sliding up and exiting the application.

The speed of installing software has increased significantly, with almost double the increase in perception.

The system has better fluency than the previous version.

I admit that the speed of installing software has improved a lot, but other than that? Image source: game lzh Huawei space storage compression function needs to be manually set after the system update, it is integrated in the system Mobile Manager, users need to click clean up acceleration, you can see file compression and application compression options, click in to see the duplicate files selected by the system, select files for compression, this option will not appear again.

Because I only use Mate 50 to take pictures, there is not much software installed in the machine, but the system still shows that it can be compressed by more than 100 megabytes.

At first I was thinking that the overall fluency of the system could be improved through software upgrades, which was a boon for Android phones. However, in the process of subsequent use, there are problems.

First of all, the battery life of the new firmware of Xiaomi 12s Ultra is not as strong as that of the previous version, especially when it wakes up at night, the power consumption of 4% is directly doubled to 8%, and in terms of game fluency, although there is no big improvement, the fuselage is obviously hot.

According to Huawei's official information, the use of dynamic space storage compression feature can save about 20GB space for 256GB, which can indeed play a role for users who are dwarfed by mobile storage. However, this technology is mainly aimed at storing photos, mobile game data and less commonly used application data for compression, and Wechat, which is the biggest headache for users, will not be optimized.

However, some is better than none, and for the system, there is no significant difference in system fluency because of the fluency of HarmonyOS 3 and the relatively few applications installed on my Mate50 phone.

For the sake of fluency, manufacturers have to make "sacrifices" whether they are Xiaomi or Huawei, in fact, they are only "optimized" based on existing technology. Xiaomi's memory space expansion ability is actually a technical readjustment based on virtual memory technology, which is an "ancient" technology that exists in Windows. Android was already implemented in Android 2, and it was divided into zRAM and swap memory optimization mechanisms at that time, but it was limited by read, write and processor performance, and the effect was not ideal.

Image source: game lzh photography to put it simply, zRAM is by compressing the less commonly used application code, and then "expanding" when using it. This compression and expansion method is more dependent on the computing power of the processor. At present, swap is the most commonly used technology for mobile phone manufacturers. Is to use part of the capacity designated in the idle ROM as the RAM running memory, so that the mobile phone can temporarily store part of the application software in the space delineated in the ROM to read and run.

But the problem is that although the storage read and write speed of ROM has been improved through development, it still does not reach the speed of running memory itself. When there is too much application data, there will be obvious stutters.

ZRAM Illustrated Source: Huang Jia Evaluation

Swap diagram illustrates the source: no matter which memory optimization technology is used, it will either cause the processor to run under high load or cause application stutters that should not have occurred.

Huawei's space storage compression function is to filter duplicate files based on an "logo" in the system, but at this stage, many applications do not provide this logo directly. And as soon as there is more than one application, the screening will always be carried out in the background of the system. For heavy mobile phone users and mobile game players, there is a certain uncertainty whether such frequent reading will indirectly bring additional loss to ROM.

The next question is, can memory expansion really lead to a real increase in fluency?

From the domestic test results, it is very unexpected that after turning on this "memory fusion" technology, many models that did not have fluency problems experienced system stutters and fever, and even some of them did not turn off this low memory after increasing the available memory, such as upgrading from 3GB to 7GB.

This explains why Xiaomi focuses on optimizing the effects of 3GB rather than blindly increasing the capacity of memory expansion, which obviously brings more application efficiency than the latter.

In my opinion, simply improving the fluency of the system through "memory expansion" technology and "space storage compression" function will feel smooth at first, but over time, it will bring some unexpected new situations.

Android will be more and more stuck this is the mechanism of the system, open the App software will not only read and write back and forth, but also leave some information fragments, while there will be mandatory recycling application problems, over time, will cause the system stutter fever.

The original intention of Android phones to add "memory fusion" technology is very good, but the problem is that different brands of phones have different specifications for RAM and ROM, which leads to a completely different experience after turning on "memory fusion" on thousands of yuan phones and flagship phones.

It is very possible that the flagship machine because the RAM and ROM can carry larger read and write data, but through such "borrowing" ROM technology means can improve the system fluency, while the mid-end RAM and ROM because of the large gap between reading and writing, but after opening, coupled with the processor performance is not enough to "power", it will cause the system, application stutter, the effect is counterproductive.

Of course, to solve this problem is not only the problem of Android manufacturers, but also the collaboration of upstream application App developers and upstream hardware supply chain. "Why should Android phones popularize 64-bit applications in 2022?" "in this article, I have said:

At present, many mainstream software are still 32-bit applications, and if they run on new architecture processors such as Snapdragon 8 + and Tianji 9000, they can only be locked on a low-performance core, so that no matter whether they lock the screen "sleep" or turn on "performance mode" to run, the application is always on the core that does not save power, which will cause stutters to waste electricity due to the lack of core performance.

Whether it is the earliest Android "butter plan" or the Doze model introduced to delay App background CPU and network activities to reduce power consumption, in fact, domestic Android applications will read all kinds of information, and even application linkage, coupled with hundreds of megabytes of size, their processes will find ways to exist in the system background and can not be completely shut down.

Android 13 source: Google, on the other hand, has defaulted to the scalable read-only file system (EROFS) as the system partition in Android 13 to improve the "read performance" of compressed data, which can improve the random read performance of system partitions by an average of 20% and reduce system space footprint by 14%, while avoiding stutters in low memory.

This is also the technology Huawei adopted in EMUI 9.1, but it has been open source since then, and other brands have followed suit.

Considering that there are not many models upgraded to Android 13 in China, this technology can not be rapidly popularized among public users, but for the earlier mid-end computers, it is still a question whether they can upgrade to Android 13.

For mass users, if not for hundreds of App heavy users like me, the current 8GB and 12GB RAM would be sufficient. If the capacity is not very full, the dynamic space storage compression function will not come in handy.

Finally, I would like to say that if the mobile phone experience can be enhanced through such a complex setting, it itself runs counter to what manufacturers say is the original intention of technology with Value for Users. I can understand that Android phone manufacturers are eager to improve system fluency, but this is not achieved by the efforts of mobile phone brands alone, but by the interaction of the Android ecosystem as a whole.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: non-objective Laboratory (ID:zhinan617), author: lzh

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