Wake up! lazy tablet!!!

Icebike

Senior Member
Apr 28, 2011
1,523
186
Anybody else notice that it seems to take the tablet a bit longer to wake up from sleep mode lately?

I press the wake button, and nothing....

Just when I reach to press it again, Blink! it wakes up. It used to be instant, but now it takes maybe 4 or 5 seconds. (i know, i know...)

This only happens if it has been asleep for more than a few minutes.
 

taichimaster

Member
Apr 29, 2011
90
7
Same here and sometimes the response just seems to be a little lagging.

Turning it off and on seems to help for a while.

I don't know Honeycomb at all, but is there something like a Registry in it that can get slow?

I've tried a lot of apps that I have installed and deleted. Does this action leave stuff behind that slows down the system?

Ken
 

EZguy

Member
Jul 3, 2011
22
0
No, mine has been as snappy off and on as always... However, my Amazon cloud player has been acting odd since 3.1... Long pauses between songs. The Google cloud player is doing the same thing, long lags between songs, or getting stuck altogether. I worry about deleting them, that I won't be able to get the app back at all... I cleared the cache, but didn't notice any difference. Wake up!
 

Icebike

Senior Member
Apr 28, 2011
1,523
186
I think I might have found why the slowness on a sleeping tablet.

I think they are putting the nic (and perhaps the entire processor) in an very low power state, and it takes a while to wake up, especially the nic.

I pinged my tablet while its sleeping and it looks like this:

PING 192.168.2.148 (192.168.2.148) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.2.148: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=3854 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.148: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=2855 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.148: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=1854 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.148: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=854 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.148: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=25.6 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.148: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=149 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.148: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=90.3 ms​

The first 4 pings take forever, then it starts answering fine. If I hit the wake button after the ping time has dropped under 100ms, it wakes instantly.

If I ping with the command
ping -c1
it will send exactly ONE ping, and then stop. I've found that is not enough to make the tablet wake quickly, it still takes 4 seconds. I have to induce quite a bit of traffic before the tablet will wake quickly.

So it looks like a power saving method to me.

Apparently it can do some processing in this low power state, probably just enough to know a push event happened on your Gmail, or google talk or something. (Those rely on a socket timeout, which takes nearly zero power for the nic to detect).
 

Icebike

Senior Member
Apr 28, 2011
1,523
186
No, mine has been as snappy off and on as always... However, my Amazon cloud player has been acting odd since 3.1... Long pauses between songs.

I think both those players cache an entire song. Its not a true continuous stream.

If the network goes to sleep while the song is playing, they have to wake up, re-establish a connection again, and download the next song.

As the app programmers get smarter, they will probably measure download speed, and calculate when they will run out of cache, and start downloading the next song in the background before the current one is done playing.
 

EZguy

Member
Jul 3, 2011
22
0
Thanks, Ice, before 3.1 both of these cloud players worked flawlessly, so I wonder if this stuttering has to do with their mucking up the wifi connection... Maybe the new patch will help...
 

EZguy

Member
Jul 3, 2011
22
0
I think both those players cache an entire song. Its not a true continuous stream.

If the network goes to sleep while the song is playing, they have to wake up, re-establish a connection again, and download the next song.

As the app programmers get smarter, they will probably measure download speed, and calculate when they will run out of cache, and start downloading the next song in the background before the current one is done playing.

This idea of caching isn't my experience with the Amazon cloud player. The second I select a song to play (I have about 30 gigs of music in this particular cloud) it starts immediately, no sense of it being buffered at all. It plays through, even when the screen goes dark. Sometimes the next song plays immediately after. Then it stops. If I tap the wake-up button, the next song starts immediately. If I tap the button immediately after a song ends, the next one begins. I experimented with setting the wireless to be always on, instead of shutting off when the screen goes black. That didn't make any difference. The app is supposed to override that shutoff of the wifi, and it all functioned perfectly until the 3.1 update. It feels like something got crossed up with this business of the app keeping the wifi going, but it still stops or has a long pause even when I set it to leave wifi on all the time.

According to reports in this forum, other apps that were misbehaving after 3.1 were improved after being removed and then re-installed. Should I try that? Is there a risk in doing that? This app is my main use of the A500. I like the speakers very much, and I also use the Amazon app to play music that is stored on the tab. It has a great sound, and I want it to work right...
 

Icebike

Senior Member
Apr 28, 2011
1,523
186
This idea of caching isn't my experience with the Amazon cloud player. The second I select a song to play (I have about 30 gigs of music in this particular cloud) it starts immediately, no sense of it being buffered at all. It plays through, even when the screen goes dark. Sometimes the next song plays immediately after. Then it stops.

But we are both saying the same thing in different ways.

When the screen is awake, it plays immediately. It downloads the entire song, and starts playing (even before its done downloading).
Then it has that song cached.

You can switch to airplane mode while its playing without interrupting the music. So clearly its not streaming in real-time.

If you watch the scrubber bar in Amazon Cloud player you can see the gray download bar followed by the yellow play bar. It downloads the entire song then starts playing. If you play an album it actually starts downloading following tracts ahead of time as well.

But when the screen goes off, and the tablet goes into sleep mode and sets the WIFI chip to low power state it no longer can handle the bandwidth needs of a download. So those songs downloaded and cached on your tablet prior to sleep mode kicking in play just fine, and then the music stops until you wake up the tablet, which wakes up the wifi chip, and downloading continues, and you have to tap the play button again.

Clearly the tablet is going into a sleep state that is too deep. It shouldn't put the nic in that deep of a sleep state. But its not entirely Acer's (or Google's) fault. The Music app and the Amazon cloud player should be sending some keep-alive packets back and forth to prevent the nic from sleeping.

If you use a true streaming music player, (there are about 100 of these in the market, I tested with DI.FM), the nic never goes to sleep when the screen is off because there is a continuous data stream. You can play all day without a problem, as long as the music is truly streamed and not downloaded and cached. Go get a radio app and try for yourself.

So, Acer/Google probably shortened the sleep timer on the nic in 3.1. That, combined with intermittent downloads and long periods of zero network traffic from these cloud music players sets us up for this situation. Personally, I think Amazon and Google should fix their apps. I like the battery saving feature.
 

LabShark

Member
Jul 7, 2011
38
1
I think I might have found why the slowness on a sleeping tablet.

I think they are putting the nic (and perhaps the entire processor) in an very low power state, and it takes a while to wake up, especially the nic.

I pinged my tablet while its sleeping and it looks like this:
PING 192.168.2.148 (192.168.2.148) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.2.148: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=3854 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.148: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=2855 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.148: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=1854 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.148: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=854 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.148: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=25.6 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.148: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=149 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.148: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=90.3 ms​

The first 4 pings take forever, then it starts answering fine. If I hit the wake button after the ping time has dropped under 100ms, it wakes instantly.

If I ping with the command
ping -c1
it will send exactly ONE ping, and then stop. I've found that is not enough to make the tablet wake quickly, it still takes 4 seconds. I have to induce quite a bit of traffic before the tablet will wake quickly.

So it looks like a power saving method to me.

Apparently it can do some processing in this low power state, probably just enough to know a push event happened on your Gmail, or google talk or something. (Those rely on a socket timeout, which takes nearly zero power for the nic to detect).

Same phenomenon here. I like your theory tho. Anything we can do about it?
 

Icebike

Senior Member
Apr 28, 2011
1,523
186
Same phenomenon here. I like your theory tho. Anything we can do about it?

I think we should file bug reports against apps that can't handle this sleeping nic problem. If they know they are going to need a network connection they should take steps to keep it alive. I believe the programmers have all the tools they need for this. See the post above yours.
 

EZguy

Member
Jul 3, 2011
22
0
I think we should file bug reports against apps that can't handle this sleeping nic problem. If they know they are going to need a network connection they should take steps to keep it alive. I believe the programmers have all the tools they need for this. See the post above yours.

Could 3.1 have throttled down the wifi altogether? When I stream a movie from Amazon Prime, I can get full screen and it sounds alright, but it's all just barely, and it indicates a poor connection even though I am sitting next to a good router...
 
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