Today is the first day I noticed it, but I have noticed the phone lagging a bit lately. It is an android phone. It came with an 8GB microSD card and I replaced that with a 64GB card about a month ago. I started putting tons of media on it (music and videos) until I put almost 30GB on it.
Today I noticed if I am playing a song or a video it will stop every few seconds, then usually restart, then freeze again. Kindof like what a PC does when the CPU is at 100% and things constantly freeze and start again.
What is going on? Is it related to the SD card? Is the processor being overworked somehow (how do I find out how much strain is being put on the processor)?
What model phone is it? I wonder if you’re using a card that is out of spec for the phone, and mostly getting away with it. Occasionally you hit a failure, and it effectively resets the sd bus.
Sandisk Ultra (class 10 I think) bought from best buy. These phones (HTC Evo 4g) are only designed to hold up to 32GB, but I’ve heard you can put a 64GB card in there and have it work. Maybe that wasn’t true. Ah well, if that is the problem then black friday comes up soon and I can get a 32GB for $15-20.
If I remember, I’ll ask a friend at the office tomorrow about some of the technical details of the 64GB cards…but I believe there is a specific (possibly optional) change going from 32 to 64 that could cause a reaction similar to what I suggested…although I’d expect the phone to just treat it like a slower card and not have a problem.
Ok…spoke to my co-worker a bit about this. There are a few possibilities that come to mind.
Did you reformat the SD card when you put it in your phone? It might have come with a file system format that is kinda supported by your phone, but exposes some bugs. Reformatting it might help there.
The ultra speed might not be handled properly on the phone side. It may be causing a timeout or corruption on the bus occasionally. If this is true, you could get a 64G card that isn’t ulta, and still have lots of space.
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Did you use the 8G card at all to see if it causes similar issues?
I had the 8GB card for almost a year and never had these problems.
FWIW, I deleted most of my media files from the card and got one of those registry cleaner apps. Doing that, the media hasn’t been skipping anymore. But I don’t know if that is a permanent solution.
As far as formatting the card, when I put it into the phone the phone said something like ‘card not in proper format, reformatting’. The card now shows 59GB of free space, so the phone is able to use it.
Was your battery sinking awfully fast at the same time? The “mediaserver” service has a bit of a bug in android and it’s set off by corrupt files. Media server handles all the media discovery processes so what happens when you start your phone is it looks for any media changes on the device or SD card, then goes through an indexes them for use in your music player, gallery, other apps, etc. Thing is, if it finds a corrupt file what happens is it gets stuck rather than skip it. The CPU use shoots up, battery is drained very quickly, and it doesn’t ever quit trying to analyze that corrupt file. You can see in a secondhand way if mediaserver is eating your phone CPU by going into the Battery menu under settings to see if it’s sitting at the top of the list for most battery used.
The fix is to get rid of the corrupt file. It could be anything from a game background graphic to a music file you just put on, though a lot of people mention the problem with their external SD cards, particularly when they have a LOT of music and photos.
It was an amplified problem on jellybean, unsure if they’ve managed to wrangle it under control with the latest OS release.
What Digital is the new Analog said is what you should do first regardless of whether the mediaserver bug popped up for you. Just reformat the SD card again - may fix all your problems to start fresh. Maybe put on one album of music at a time and see if one of them is causing issues.
As ridiculously simple as it sounds, have you tried restarting your phone? Occasionally if I’ve left my phone on for a long period of time, I’ll have problems with my phone freezing, lagging, etc., and powering it off for a little bit always solves the problem.
Yeah I’ve tried both restarting it and turning it off, leaving it off, then turning it on again. That didn’t make a difference. Right now (that I’ve deleted most of the media and got some registry cleaner apps) it isn’t constantly pausing media now. But I have no idea if that will come back.
The problem didn’t start until I started putting video files on my phone. Music never had problems. Right now I’m adding visual media back and seeing how it goes. Maybe one file was causing the problem, and as long as I don’t add it back I’m fine.
If that fails, I will delete everything on the SD card and reformat it. I don’t want to do that first because I’ll have to reinstall about 30 apps that are stored on my card.
Ok…sounds like you’re on a good debugging track. You’ve done something that seems to eliminate the problem, and are now slowly going back to the old setup to see if it comes back.
The corrupted file scenario makes sense to me, although I haven’t run into it before. Keep track of what you’re adding, when, so if the problem does creep back in, you can remove the last bunch of files and see if it fixes it.
If that does happen…add them back in. If the problem comes back, delete some OTHER stuff. That will tell us if it’s a particular set of files, or if it’s the total size that’s causing the issue.