beazley.org

WinterBoard slowing me down?

Posted August 20, 2009

A few weeks ago my phone started feeling slow. I began noticing lags in just about everything and it was getting on my nerves!

It began after going to 3.0 but I can't recall anything else that could be causing it. My wife noticed it, too, for I had jailbroken hers finally after she went to 3.0. She complained about it enough that she convinced me not to jailbreak it (again) after updated hers to 3.01. After that, her phone was speedy again. Time to start digging...

I went into hardcore troubleshooting mode and started turning things off here, disabling things there even uninstalling stuff in some cases - re-testing between adjustments, of course. I couldn't locate the problem. No matter what I tried, it remained sluggish.

During the course of the last couple of weeks, I've visited countless website and forums, talked to plenty of other folks and tried all sorts of crazy things. One of the things that was suggested was removing unnecessary launch deamons. I removed these from /System/Library/LaunchDaemons, but I couldn't really tell a difference:

com.apple.AOSNotification.plist com.apple.datamigrator.plist com.apple.DumpPanic.plist com.apple.iqagent.plist com.apple.MobileInternetSharing.plist com.apple.powerlog.plist com.apple.racoon.plist

Even though I've since resolved my speed issue (keep reading), I've kept these disabled. Doesn't seem to hurt anything and I like getting speed wherever I can.

The thing I did keep coming across, though, was MobileSubtrate and WinterBoard. I don't really care for themes and didn't have anything too crazy installed via WinterBoard, but what I did have I was really fond of and wanted to keep. So, I spent a few days digging into how they did what they did and figured out ways to do it outside of WinterBoard (with one exception). Here's what I had installed/activated in WinterBoard and what I did to replace it:

  1. CricketSMS. Yes, I love crickets and my SMS tone is very loud and noticable. I don't miss a text message with this one. Plus it's quite a conversation piece. To replace this, I simply had to backup and replace the .caf files that CricketSMS had previously installed in /System/Library/Audio/UISounds.

  2. Volume Booster. I can't really tell if this one worked or not, to be honest. I wish the damn phone was louder. About the only thing loud enough on my phone is my cricket SMS tone and that's probably because of the way it was recorded. I may go through and up the volume on all the UI sounds I'd like to be louder, but that's another story. To replace this, I copied, backed up and restored /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Celestial.framework/RegionalVolumeLimits.plist after changing the default values to 8.00000.

  3. One Missed Call ringtone. I'm not sure what this from, but it's uniquely creepy - much like how I'm described quite often, so it fits. This is also very simple, just copy, uninstall and replace the .m4r file for the ringtone to /Library/Ringtones.

The one I couldn't replace (yet) was Transparent Dock, but if it's a choice between that and speed, I'll take speed any day. Once I figure out how to replace this one, I'll update this post.

Okay, so I replaced or decided to live without the things I was using WinterBoard for. After that, I uninstalled it, rebooted and everything has been zippy as the first day I took it home.

WinterBoard's fault? I can't say with 100% certainty but it worked for me. I'm sold.

Please share your own experiences, I'd love to hear if it worked for you if you were having issues. If you are running WinterBoard and are not having these issues, I'd like to hear about that, too.