[Preemptive]

Symptoms:

• It starts running reeeaaaalllyy slooow. (with only a few or one card open)
• Tapping an icon gets the ripple and highlight, but no action or the mini-card appears & 'pulses', but doesn't start.
• The lockscreen works OK, but I just see blue sky - the PIN entry KB takes an age / doesn't appear.
• The phone gets hot.
• Mute button reset is a temporary fix, but the phone loses time - about 6 years!
• No error messages.

My only thought at this point is that maybe the phone is quite full of data & doesn't have much memory to play with. I'm using the uberkernel.

Does anyone have any ideas?

[Xeron]

Dunno. I think i'd reach for the doctor if it was like that...

Do you have all your ipks?

[mazzinia]

the gets hot is a clue, here.
The pre3, in unfortunate cases, has the habit of getting hot due to a rogue process going full throttle.
Try to see from novaterm if something is abusing of the cpu...

[Preemptive]

Dunno. I think i'd reach for the doctor if it was like that...

Do you have all your ipks?

Yes

I'm just wondering if it's a disk space problem. I could back up and delete stuff like SMS, calendar entries etc.

The last and (not exactly) only time I tried doctoring took multiple attempts. Maybe it's designed to convince the user that the phone is truly bricked so the relief when it finally works is so much greater. If it comes to it, I will likely use that phone (Pre2) as I stopped using it when it developed battery drain issues. I'd do a full back up, reinstall and ALL the various fixes. But I assume that will take all weekend.

[Preemptive]

the gets hot is a clue, here.
The pre3, in unfortunate cases, has the habit of getting hot due to a rogue process going full throttle.
Try to see from novaterm if something is abusing of the cpu...

Thanks, I'll have a look next time. If it were a PC, I'd think it was desperately writing from disk to memory and back, but on a phone it's all sort of the same stuff.
EDIT: What command do I need for that? top?

[mazzinia]

yep, top works for that.

In my pre3 I have a rogue process randomly after disconnecting my bt headset.
And once some service went nuts polling nonstop ... data off + wifi off + 5 reboots ( and yelling ) helped , erm

[TJs11thPre]

This thread has one of THOSE suggestions...

You know, the ones that are expressed so simply, yet are not. Like, "oh, you just need to go around that mountain range. Yes, the Rockies, that's the one."

Novaterm? Top? Huh?

Id love to audit in real-time when my device is acting strange. I have no idea how, or what to look for.

It's OK, I'm nearing the end...my Pre2 is not well either, after taking a swim in the washing machine last week. it's fully functional, surprisingly, but has powered down twice in my pocket with no reason. Has never done that before. And it's skipping letters occasionally too, making it as hard to type as any Android swype keyboard.

I hope you get it sorted out!

[Preemptive]

This thread has one of THOSE suggestions...

You know, the ones that are expressed so simply, yet are not. Like, "oh, you just need to go around that mountain range. Yes, the Rockies, that's the one."

Novaterm? Top? Huh?

Id love to audit in real-time when my device is acting strange. I have no idea how, or what to look for.

I don't know much - I have an old book on Linux somewhere I should read. I know 'cd' (change directory) and 'ls' (list directory contents) so I can navigate in the terminal. I don't know what top stands for (oh, top users. Thanks www!), but there's an actual app in Preware called jstop

The Linux Top Command

Linux Newbie Guide: Shortcuts And Commands

It's OK, I'm nearing the end...my Pre2 is not well either, after taking a swim in the washing machine last week. it's fully functional, surprisingly, but has powered down twice in my pocket with no reason. Has never done that before. And it's skipping letters occasionally too, making it as hard to type as any Android swype keyboard.

I hope you get it sorted out!

I hesitate to suggest this, but your problems are likely moisture or impurities inside the phone. The more you can disassemble, clean and dry it, the better. Of course, this carries risks for the unwary... Maybe a warm cupboard, but I guess internal operating temps are enough to evaporate just water...

[TJs11thPre]

I have jstop app. I don't know how to use it, but it's running and auto collecting. I've tried deleting processes with the side swipe action, idk if that's the whole idea or if I'm making it worse. Never seems to make a difference.

The moisture is surely gone from wherever possible. Even the ghosting the screen cleared up. But there's likely oily residue that the water carried to tighter creases and that'll never come out without a sonic bath in a more serious treatment, like distilled water. The price of that service is more than a new in box, old stock, pre 2. Then i have to buy 2 more batteries. Just to restore 3G and 320x480 camera resolution?

This GS4 is a Porsche compared to the hot rodded old VW bug that is my Franken. Lol i have to be realistic, based on the circumstances. Plus, I'll have the Veer, which is practically new. It's OK. In fact, I'm writing this just to hear it in my head more often so i accept it and move forward.

It would be different if it were a Pre3. That device deserves a bit more effort to maintain. It's a unicorn, after all. Well, to stick with the analogy, i guess it's more like a vintage Ferrari.

So i really hope you get it sorted. I miss mine, but i knew it would have moments like yours in its future and i didn't want to deal with the stress.
Good luck!

[hanksimon]

Two off the wall suggestions:
1. For the unwell Pre3, if you haven't tried it, maybe a simple cold start. Full stop. I rarely turn mine off, and I feel that the 'garbage collection' (?) from a one minute cold stop and start seems to make both the Pre3 and the Touchpad work a little better. Of course, there's also the slim chance that an unwell device may not turn back on.

2. For the wet Pre2, if you feel it isn't dry, you might put it into some dry rice overnight, or for a week, like some suggest for dropping a cell phone into water. I've never heard of the water-based oil issue, but rice [or a bunch of silica desiccant packages can suck the moisture out of most turn-off device.

FWIW....

[UI Designer]

Two off the wall suggestions:
1. For the unwell Pre3, if you haven't tried it, maybe a simple cold start. Full stop. I rarely turn mine off, and I feel that the 'garbage collection' (?) from a one minute cold stop and start seems to make both the Pre3 and the Touchpad work a little better. Of course, there's also the slim chance that an unwell device may not turn back on.

2. For the wet Pre2, if you feel it isn't dry, you might put it into some dry rice overnight, or for a week, like some suggest for dropping a cell phone into water. I've never heard of the water-based oil issue, but rice -- or a bunch of silica desiccant packages can suck the moisture out of most turn-off device.

FWIW....

I could not see the contents of your post on my Pre3 using the Forums app, but I could quote it and saw you used an open square bracket without closing it, plus I think square brackets have special meaning, so this may have caused the issue. I replaced that open square bracket above with 2 dashes.

Looks like that worked since now I can see the contents of your post in what I quoted above. Hope this helps others as well.

... maybe the phone is quite full of data & doesn't have much memory to play with. ...

Does anyone have any ideas?

...
I'm just wondering if it's a disk space problem. I could back up and delete stuff like SMS, calendar entries etc.
...

If you think your Pre3 is getting full of SMS, Calendar, and other data, and may be having a disk space issue, have you taken a look in /var/db/main/ using Internalz, sort that directory by Size, and see how large in size the 2 largest files are, which are usually indexes.db and objects.db?

They should ideally be less than around 20-25MB total and if they are larger than around 50-100MB, then you may run into issues, especially if you did not at least resize partitions in the past as covered in this post number 298 of mine:
http://forums.webosnation.com/showth...77#post3442677

You can use the Linux command:
df -h
to check the disk usage of each partition to see how full each one is.

Also, are you using the built-in Email app?
If so, are you using IMAP or POP?
If IMAP, how many days worth of email are you telling it to keep (does POP have this same option too?)?

I stopped using the webOS Email app to read email since there is no option to tell it to not automatically load images (I hope LuneOS has this option since it helps reduce SPAM email tracking you too) and I think it may have partly contributed to /var/db/main/ getting too full on my Pre3 when I had it keep more than 3 days worth of IMAP email (I think the root cause was Google sync issues fixed by the Google Calendars Sync Behaviors patch aka googleoauth or oauth).

Have you looked for any out of the ordinary error or warning messages in /var/log/messages or use Lumberjack to look for them?


I hope your Pre3 starts feeling better soon. Let us know what you find.

[Grabber5.0]

I could not see the contents of your post on my Pre3 using the Forums app, but I could quote it and saw you used an open square bracket without closing it, plus I think square brackets have special meaning, so this may have caused the issue. I replaced that open square bracket above with 2 dashes.

Looks like that worked since now I can see the contents of your post in what I quoted above. Hope this helps others as well.

I hadn't noticed that, you're right. Brackets are part of typical forum markup code, so unbalanced brackets can cause problems. I haven't been in the Forums code in a while, but I'll make a note to look at it. I'm not crazy about writing parsing code, but I might be able to catch obvious problems without mangling posts.

Now back on topic, when my phones are acting strange, I use Lumberjack to follow the log for "everything" or open a shell and run "tail -f /var/log/messages" and look for lots or errors or unusual messages (which of course is difficult if you are not familiar with what's normal.. There are tons of things logged that sound bad but aren't). My previous FrankenPre2 goes insane periodically with messages about hidd errors, which a reboot does not fix, and requires restarting the hidd service. I have put off doctoring it hoping I can fix it, but I'm no longer hopeful. It may well be hardware, which a doctor won't fix anyway.

Sent from my Palm Pre3 using Forums

[Preemptive]

Two off the wall suggestions:
1. For the unwell Pre3, if you haven't tried it, maybe a simple cold start. Full stop. I rarely turn mine off, and I feel that the 'garbage collection' (?) from a one minute cold stop and start seems to make both the Pre3 and the Touchpad work a little better.

Thanks. I'm pretty sure I've done this, but maybe I've been looking at luna restarts / fullrestarts / crashes.

I've just shut it down and pulled the battery for a minute before rebooting & will see if it has any affect. ...Hmmm I've got that mysterious red light at the top right (battery was full), but it seems to be booting OK. Right, boots OK and runs fine (red light gone), but I have an alert I've seen before after reboots - an old spam text from March, 2015. Why this? Because it's not in my contacts list? As it was over a year old, I checked Clocksync:

Your device is off by 2433 days 1 hr 45 mins 34 sec

So, my phone has lost time again and thinks it is January the 6th, 2010.

[Grabber5.0]

Ah the mystery light. Doesn't mean anything.

[Preemptive]

If you think your Pre3 is getting full of SMS, Calendar, and other data, and may be having a disk space issue, have you taken a look in /var/db/main/ using Internalz, sort that directory by Size, and see how large in size the 2 largest files are, which are usually indexes.db and objects.db?

They should ideally be less than around 20-25MB total and if they are larger than around 50-100MB, then you may run into issues, especially if you did not at least resize partitions in the past as covered in this post number 298 of mine:
"The application database is almost full"? - Page 15 - webOS Nation Forums

First two items:
indexes.db - 9.99MB
objects.db - 8.12MB
(also, next is kinds.db at only 60KB)
I've never resized partitions on mobile devices.

You can use the Linux command:
df -h
to check the disk usage of each partition to see how full each one is.

I'll get back to this.

Also, are you using the built-in Email app?
If so, are you using IMAP or POP?
If IMAP, how many days worth of email are you telling it to keep (does POP have this same option too?)?

I stopped using the webOS Email app to read email since there is no option to tell it to not automatically load images (I hope LuneOS has this option since it helps reduce SPAM email tracking you too) and I think it may have partly contributed to /var/db/main/ getting too full on my Pre3 when I had it keep more than 3 days worth of IMAP email (I think the root cause was Google sync issues fixed by the Google Calendars Sync Behaviors patch aka googleoauth or oauth).

I'm using IMAP only with 2 accounts (only one is busy) all set to 7 days. Assuming old emails are being deleted, then I would expect this potential problem to have happened a long time ago. However, accumulated calendar / SMS / phone messages / logs? They might have built up

Have you looked for any out of the ordinary error or warning messages in /var/log/messages or use Lumberjack to look for them?

I'll also get into this later. One of the reasons I originally switched to this was that my Pre2 had some condition that was eating the battery - I could never puzzle out what it was from the logs, but I've been meaning to do the whole Back up / doctor / set up thing with it to make a guide - just a matter of finding a big block of time!

[Preemptive]

Ah the mystery light. Doesn't mean anything.

You say that, but why then does it appear?

Rod Whitby said he would investigate, then vanished! (Last known sighting of the man is here) PIC promised to include the red light feature in their new devices (once they knew what it was for) and now even their website is gone!

Some say Palm learned how to store data in a miniature black hole and the red light warns that the gravitational clamps are temporarily unlocked, others that the true meaning of the red light can only be known to followers who devote themselves fully to 'The way of Palm'.

Though posting this from my monastic mountain retreat, I am merely an acolyte. But perhaps one day I will comprehend - or at least get more than one bar of 3G up here!

[briest]

the true meaning of the red light can only be known to followers who devote themselves fully to 'The way of Palm'.

You mean Zen of Palm? I've found the lecture enlightening; it's depressing that such wisdom gets forgotten nowadays.