Hello,

Thanks for reading. I am on the honeymoon phase of my jailbreaking experience and it is amazing when the iPhone doesn't crash.

Will a RESTORE followed by manual reinstall of all the apps allow my 3g to run faster without the clutter. I know Windows benefits from clean installs especially if you install/delete many applications.

Is it possible to RESTORE my 15-month old iPhone 3g with only the contacts? My iphone 3g runs kinda slow even before the jailbreak and I am wondering if I need to perform a "CLEAN INSTALL" like on Windows instead of restoring from backups.

I have a jailbroken Iphone 3g using blackra1n. I am using backgrounder with pro switcher with beejive, facebook, and a to-do program(THINGS) running. I kept on getting crashes and other oddities due to available RAM being about 30mb with no applications open. I've had to kill background apps that cause freezes.

I am getting better results with IphoneVM virtual memory app: less unexplained application shutdowns and springboard failures.

I am also using Cydialer, SBSettings, Cydget, and Five-Column SB.

Thanks.

It sounds like your problems are related to overtaxing your phone's memory.

This is not windows with it's "need to restore every 9 months" problems.
Restoring might upgrade your baseband and give you other problems. Don't restore unless you really need to.

The 3G and 2G were very much designed to run one main app at a time. They did not have a huge amount of free memory left after the base OS loaded. If you are finding that virtual memory helps then you definitively need more real ram. Or cut back what you are trying to do on the phone at the same time.

Get a 3GS, it has double the real memory plus a more compact instruction set. Try and find one on eBay with the old bootrom, double the ram makes a huge difference.

Thanks for replying Olethros. I was wondering how much base RAM is typically left after OS is loaded.

I think the most I've seen is 40mb on my 3g. Does the OS really take up 88mb(out of 128mb)? What is the max base RAM available after OS is loaded? Is 40mb too low?

There's usually about 10mb left when I load up IM, Facebook and To-Do app.

I was thinking of a "Clean install" because the phone has slowed down in the last year. Especially from 3.0 firmware.

I also heard others speaking of faster bootup times in the tens of seconds. It takes about 90 seconds to reboot from off. Thanks.

Originally Posted by pjny

Thanks for replying Olethros. I was wondering how much base RAM is typically left after OS is loaded.

I think the most I've seen is 40mb on my 3g. Does the OS really take up 88mb(out of 128mb)? What is the max base RAM available after OS is loaded? Is 40mb too low?

There's usually about 10mb left when I load up IM, Facebook and To-Do app.

I was thinking of a "Clean install" because the phone has slowed down in the last year. Especially from 3.0 firmware.

I also heard others speaking of faster bootup times in the tens of seconds. It takes about 90 seconds to reboot from off. Thanks.

My advice, leverage push notifications so you keep less apps running all the time. Cut down on the number of things that run all the time.

OS X that the iPhone OS is based on is not tiny, it does take a lot of memory (how much varies depending on what platform you run it on, the 3GS has a more efficient instruction set so the OS uses less memory)

30-40MB free after restart sounds normal (I have a 2G iPhone which runs nearly identically memory and performance wise to the 3G - except for the 3G data aspect). The memory management routines in modern operating systems are very efficient and try to avoid leaving any memory free when the same memory can be used to increase performance.

Restart times vary greatly, they can be very slow if you force a restart and it needs to check the filesystem during startup.

If you use a "custom firmware" via pwnagetool to clean install and set the iPhone up as new this will give you the cleanest install. Don't simply "restore" in iTunes as you will upgrade your baseband, possibly permanently.