Android 4.3 Will Likely Speed Up I/O Performance of Previous Generation Nexus 7

[dgstorm]

Has the performance of your OG 2012 Nexus 7 seemed to be getting slower and slower over time? If you have experienced this, you are not alone. It was apparently an I/O issue which will likely be vastly improved with the new Android 4.3 update. According to the latest info, some lines of code have been found within Android 4.3 which will enable something in the background called TRIM. It's basically a new functionality which cleans up the internal memory on your device and dumps out all the old and unused files.

Sound off if you are one of the lucky folks who has received their Android 4.3 on your older Nexus 7 and let us know if it has helped your performance.

Source: Phandroid

 

[Mrhelper]

Interesting revelation. I received the 4.3 update last Friday (7/26/13). I never noticed any performance problems on 4.2. I don't use the storage very hard though. Those who try a lot of apps, copy in a lot of media, or otherwise use the storage more heavily will likely notice significant improvement. When you consider the mechanism involved, it seems possible that frequent use of manual or automated cache cleaners would have exacerbated the problem also.

Note that the issue addressed by fstrim affects eMMC storage I/O, not I/O in general. It would affect internal storage response times. As well as slowing user file operations, it was likely causing slow cache access, slow app startup, and possibly laggy boot times. The symptoms and effects on performance are apparently similar to severe fragmentation of file systems on a hard disk, though the underlying cause and mechanism are different.

In any case, it is nice to know that they were able to fix that problem. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

 

[edap]

TRIM is great because devices that use solid-state drives – the kind of memory storage that doesn’t require a spinning hard drive – end up slowing down because they fill themselves up with the garbage you tried to delete. Though you may clear out apps, songs, or other files to clear memory space on your phone or tablet, those files you think you delete aren’t actually deleted. They’re simply flagged as available space that can be rewritten over. What TRIM does is go through and wipe out data that you have marked as unnecessary. It's like a fountain of youth.