Preload On Pandora?


Trip

Sorry, but I suck at explaining stuff :P
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With the Pandora being on most of the time and programs being shut down + started up a lot, I wondered if something like Preload would be useful?
I've used it on my laptop and it seems to work well. With the laptop having enough power I tend just to leave stuff open anyway though so it doesn't get much use. With the Pandora having less resources, I would be more inclined to shut off programs when I'm not using them and Preload could help them to start up faster.

Anybody got any thoughts on if the memory that the program takes up would be worth the speed up or not? or has anyone used Preload on a mobile device before?
 
Yes, it should help, but less than on a laptop with a HDD and enough memory. On a HDD, especially laptops, seek-times are the biggest issue, and preload greatly helps with that, as files are read more sequentially from the disk. So all needed files are actually read in faster.
Flash's read-latency is far lower, so that's no issue. On flash, Preload just makes the flash-drive read everything needed at once, while the rest of the boot-system is doing other things. Reading all files still takes the same amount of time, but is now done parallel to the rest of the boot-sequence, instead of read in as needed.

As for memory, Preload puts the files it loads in linux's filesystem-cache. If linux needs more memory, unused files are removed from that cache. As such, it doesn't use a noticeable amount of memory. But as the Pandora has less memory, files will get evicted faster, so don't expect it to be really helpful in lowering startup-times of less-used apps, or after an app used up most of Pandora's memory.
 
Preload is a good option but it remains to be seen if its really going to be of any use .. I've tried it on Touchbook and Angstrom/Beagle, and .. if you're only running an app at a time .. it seems to shave off a few seconds here and there, but if you multitask/open other apps: not really worth it.

There are still many things that can be done to speed up boot-time of the onboard Linux distro .. removal of all extraneous modules/tight configuration of the kernel specifically for the hardware, and so on .. more than likely, we'll see boot times approaching 10 or 15 seconds, or even lower, and as well things like cryopid and sleep-states can be used to make the entire experience a lot slicker.

We can accomplish 'fast startup times' by properly using sleep, never shutting down, and freezing/defrosting our main UI apps instead of going through the whole boot process .. so instead of optimizing boot-up beyond 10 seconds or so, we simply give apps the ability to fully suspend the system (simulated powerdown) and smoothly recover on juice ..
 
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