Totally not tested, but can’t systemd set up the swap file?
/usr/lib/systemd/system/swapfile.swap
[Unit]
Description=Swap File
Before=swap.target
[Swap]
What=/swapfile
[Install]
WantedBy=swap.target
1 Like
Yeap, I can confirm, this is highly similar to what I’m seeing on X10II.
Only ever had microG.
And I try not to go over 20 browser tabs, any more than that and it starts to struggle (as do I with remembering what I needed each tab for 
I believe it can, but not tried yet. I’m only a fairly basic linux tinkerer!
This unfortunately can only be fixed either by optimizing the system (which clearly goes in the opposite direction so that’s not an option) or by increasing the amount of available memory. I’m sure the next device is going to require at least 4 or 6 GB of RAM. That’s the way it goes. Must be a law of nature 
4 Likes
It could be that I am observing app crashing as well as described in this thread: Android app background execution - #13 by tombln
The app (komoot) runs for a while in background, but at some point, when I reopen it, it appears to be freshly started/reset.
Would those be symptoms of crashed/forcefully stopped android apps? I have not yet found a way to have the app run for a longer time in the background, it reliably crashes/resets after around 15-30min in the background.
On a 10 ii that is.
I don’t have any other apps except Fernschreiber running, and on the android side only MicroG. So I am not sure how this could be caused by memory issues? What do you guys think? Is there a way I could figure out if it was caused by memory issues?
Maybe I could just start a bash loop which prints memory usage into a file every x seconds and see how it went during the crash?
2 Likes
Arghh, can’t edit original post to keep this info together.
Anyway, another full days usage and the worst figures I got were:
free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3556 3089 53 27 412 446
Swap: 2047 1923 124
That was with deliberately heavy usage, 6 native + 6 big Android apps running.
No app crashes so far, but I have noticed some delays (1-2 seconds) switching between apps before the screen reloaded. Looking good so far with the extra 1GB swap. Could probably reduce it to 512MB, that would have been sufficient 90% of the time. Will keep going another couple days and then try increasing ZRAM and report findings back here.
Have the same Problem and it is anoying as hell! It happens not only once a day, that all apps or at least all android apps are closed while phone is laying arround. No Android, no Nextcloud talk messages are ariving anymore. You only get notice of it if you get a call, asking for response 
4.2.0.21 does not make anything better!
Has someone reported this via zendesk? Maybe none of the responsible at Jolla is reading here…
Just wanted to document what I did on my Xperia 10 ii 4.3.0.12 in case it may help someone (thanks for all the information in your posts) :
dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=1024
chmod 600 swapfile
mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile
then edited “/vendor/etc/fstab.pdx201” to reduce zram to 500M and mount the swap file :
...
# ZRAM/SWAP
/dev/block/zram0 none swap defaults
/swapfile none swap sw 0 0
...
I find the result quite dramatic (positively) especially for android apps, and its seems to resist in time and reboots. 1GB swap is probably overkill though.
6 Likes
Thanks for sharing your experiences! Does the entry for the /swapfile really work for you on a reboot? Somehow in my case the swapfile does not get mounted on a XA2. The only difference is that I made the swap on /home/swapfile instead directly in root. Does this matter somehow?
I can confirm that komoot is crashing after some minutes of usage. No other apps open or in background at this time. This is valid for all other navigation apps I am using - OSM and Here. I am on a XA2 and discovered this behavior with the latest version of Sailfish. Can not remember seeing this before.
Yes, it gets mounted at boot :
[defaultuser@Xperia10II-DualSIM ~]$ cat /proc/swaps
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/zram0 partition 524284 311104 -2
/swapfile file 1048572 0 -3
/swapfile is owned by root and rw-------.
Ah OK. I checked if the swapfile in the root directory gets automounted and it works.
Here are the two lines in the fstab:
/home/swapfile none swap defaults 0 0 doesn’t work
/swapfile none swap defaults 0 0 works
Great, thanks for the feedback.
After some testing with an additional swapfile I can say that the problem still exist. Navigation Apps still crashing after some minutes. I can see that swap is growing after start but with a maximum of 150MB. Memory used is growing from 1,3GB in idle without any apps to ~1,8GB then crashing. How much memory do your devices consume after start without any other apps?
That is really not a good metric with Linux kernels which follow the “free RAM is wasted RAM” philosophy. On a properly working system you could see 99% used memory all the time and nothing crashing.
The whole thing is made even more complicated on SFOS where the native side and the Android side use different technologies for dealing with low memory situations - and the technologies used differ from device to device and release to release.
See also:
2 Likes
Thanks for the hints. By used memory I meant the active memory. There was a bunch of cached and buffered memory too so that free memory was something round 40MB before crash. After studying the links in your post I understand the problem better.
Tested this on XZ2c, and definitely improves things… Infortunately, my remaining system memory is barely over 1g as is. Maybe will test 750 or something…
Unfortunately it got worse with 4.4.0.58.
Browser update (bigger memory consumption) causes problems with other apps. 