[Q] Why does Browser data sometimes become huge? - Nexus One Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

I usually keep my N1 at around 30-50 MB free of internal storage, which is enough to have everything I want loaded on, but it's tough to free up much more space than that without uninstalling apps or moving to SD the apps that shouldn't be moved.
So anyway, today my phone suddenly dropped down to 13 MB left and the culprit appeared to be Browser data - suddenly over 46 MB! The cache was already cleared. I went through with Root Explorer and found that the largest file was located in:
/data/data/com.android.browser/app_thumbnails
For some reason a 31.5 MB file had made it into this directory, and Android clearly is not smart enough to clean it up. Anyway I deleted the offending file via Root Explorer and now it's happy.
Any thoughts on how to keep the browser from ballooning like this? I didn't want to delete all browser data because of bookmarks, cookies etc.

because in 2.2 froyo google updated the browser to temporarily store the entire contents of the page you are browsing into memory such that if you lost data connection, the page could be reloaded without the data connection. so when you have a few tabs open in the browser, or a very large site open, all contents are temporarily being stored for just in case.
if you were to close out all the tabs, kill the browser, all would return to normal. often times my browser hits up over 80MB because i have tons of pages open. i just kill all my tabs and the low space warnings go right away.
its a trade off, i dont mind it cause its better than the old way, but the trade off is we suffer with low storage.

I'll try closing tabs next time, but I swear I'd already closed all the tabs and still the bloat persisted across reboots...
Sent from my Nexus One using XDA App

also delete the browser cache if you want to clear the pron vid, that stuff can take up quite a bit of space

cmstlist said:
I'll try closing tabs next time, but I swear I'd already closed all the tabs and still the bloat persisted across reboots...
Sent from my Nexus One using XDA App
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when this happens to me, occasionally i kill all the tabs and it takes a small bit of time for it to appear back to normal, but never more than a minute or so. but if i close the tabs, then force close the browser, it for sure instantly clears the used space back.
if its happening to you across reboots, then might be something completely different.
FYI i havent cleared my browser cache since July last year hehh, and i use the browser like a madman. i wonder how much space i'd get back if i did?

I find that when space is low, it automatically empties the browser cache to zero. In the scenario I described above, the cache was already empty.
Sent from my Nexus One using XDA App

Related

How to Stop Browser Reloads??

I have tried to ignore this issue but it's gotten to be such a huge pain in the ass that I have to ask. Every time I open a new browser window (tabbed browsing) or use another app even for a split second and switch back to the browser, the whole page reloads -- wtf?? Pisses the hell out of me.
Does that happen to everyone else too?
I'm running Cyanogen 4.2.5, with an 8 GB fat/ext3/linux-swap partitioned SD card. I have very few apps, and am always running 30+ MB free according to TasKiller. The browser reloads even happen when I kill all other tasks except for the browser.
Is there a way to minimize or stop the browser reloads from happening altogether?
Always Happens for me too.
This is pretty ridiculous. I can be on a single webpage, press home for literally 1 second, then go back to browser and it'll reload. (With no other apps open). Grrr
The worst part is the page is 90% visible, so why does it need to fully reload?? (You can press Stop, but then it continues reloading and leaves you with a white screen.)
There has to be a way to stop this?
This is ridiculous
Paul22000 said:
This is ridiculous
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Click to collapse
so is this

Browser hogging internal phone storage?

Ever since I updated my nexus to Froyo, when I'm using the browser itll start to take up all of my available memory causing me to get the low storage warning and sometimes stop me from getting text messages. The only way to free back up the memory is to go force close the browser, which is sometimes using up to 80 mb of data. Ive already tried a factory data reset and also went into the recovery and wiped and clear the cache. I never had this problem in 2.1 and its really annoying. anyone got any ideas? thanks.
forceclosing the browser wont clear up cache.... scroll down instead of forceclosing, and hit clear cache. dont do it through recovery
I am having this problem too D:
Yeah, the browser doesn't seem to limit cache, although I've never seen it use 80M. Most I've seen is 7M. I just clear cache through the Applications list, although in Froyo you can do it directly in the browser now.
if you visit the google forums, the android team has changed the browser in 2.2 to cache the pages you have open in your browser much more aggressively, so that when you go back to the browser the phone doesnt need to refresh the network and reload the page. i posted a link to the google topic before. but what this means is that the browser now takes up huge amounts of space as time goes on. killing it does bring back the space. personally i like this change, but i can see why it might suck for some people.
here's the link
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2171
Anyone who is having this issue, go here and click the star to vote for this issue: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1068
i posted against this issue, because i happen to like what they did to the new browser. god forbid they go back to the old way, it was not good.
I agree, the browser is better this way in some regards, but it needs to LIMIT what it does... If you don't manually clear cache it'll easily take 8+ megs of storage!
khaytsus said:
I agree, the browser is better this way in some regards, but it needs to LIMIT what it does... If you don't manually clear cache it'll easily take 8+ megs of storage!
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but its not the cache, its just a temporary storage usage. if you force close the browser, it regains back that storage. at least for me it does. my actual cache in the browser never changes, and hovers around 7mb.
Aaaand we're not using A2SD why???
RogerPodacter said:
but its not the cache, its just a temporary storage usage. if you force close the browser, it regains back that storage. at least for me it does. my actual cache in the browser never changes, and hovers around 7mb.
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Ah, sorry, I got off topic then.. I was talking specifically about the browser cache, which for me varies between 4-8.5M it seems.. and I clear it because otherwise I'm <20M
Christopher3712 said:
Aaaand we're not using A2SD why???
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Click to collapse
Because not everyone is rooted running non-stock roms?
Simple solution
Friend was having the same issue but this was pre-froyo.
Found out that after viewing articles on the news and weather app and also viewing webpages she was just hitting the home softkey to return to the main page. This was causing new window after new window of fully loaded websites to be cached out of memory and into storage.
Although i agree there should be a caching limit on the browser there should also be an effort from the end user to close the unused windows when done (easily done through the windows menu). Also after using the news and weather app and any other app that uses the browser to display pages, it should be good practice to use the back button and not the home key.
I've always done that and now my girlfriend does it and guess what... its not an issue anymore.
Cabarnacus said:
Friend was having the same issue but this was pre-froyo.
Found out that after viewing articles on the news and weather app and also viewing webpages she was just hitting the home softkey to return to the main page. This was causing new window after new window of fully loaded websites to be cached out of memory and into storage.
Although i agree there should be a caching limit on the browser there should also be an effort from the end user to close the unused windows when done (easily done through the windows menu). Also after using the news and weather app and any other app that uses the browser to display pages, it should be good practice to use the back button and not the home key.
I've always done that and now my girlfriend does it and guess what... its not an issue anymore.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Except that you can't use the back button in the browser if you've been browsing a lot, you'll be going backwards through a bunch of pages. And if you've logged in, you can't go past that at all as it'll want to repost data etc...
One could close the window I suppose, which would load a default homepage, then go back, but that's tedious.
khaytsus said:
Except that you can't use the back button in the browser if you've been browsing a lot, you'll be going backwards through a bunch of pages. And if you've logged in, you can't go past that at all as it'll want to repost data etc...
One could close the window I suppose, which would load a default homepage, then go back, but that's tedious.
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Tedious? Thats almost as bad as that YouTube review of the Nexus where one guy said he had to move his hand "All the way up to the top of the phone" just to switch it on. (Surely we've all seen it?)
I wouldn't say tedious, just something to get used to. Sadly Google aren't quite there with their Google MindReader beta for Android but until then menus and manually closing windows work just fine ;-)
Cabarnacus said:
Tedious? Thats almost as bad as that YouTube review of the Nexus where one guy said he had to move his hand "All the way up to the top of the phone" just to switch it on. (Surely we've all seen it?)
I wouldn't say tedious, just something to get used to. Sadly Google aren't quite there with their Google MindReader beta for Android but until then menus and manually closing windows work just fine ;-)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Steps to properly exit browser
Menu button
Select Windows option
X on all open Windows
Back Button
Not exactly "move hand to top of phone".
And again, my major complaint is about the lack of a limited browser cache, ie: html, css, images, cached for later reload. It grows over 8M, that's really too much IMO. Should be able to limit it, in which case I'd likely limit it to 2-3M myself and see how it worked out.
khaytsus said:
Except that you can't use the back button in the browser if you've been browsing a lot, you'll be going backwards through a bunch of pages. And if you've logged in, you can't go past that at all as it'll want to repost data etc...
One could close the window I suppose, which would load a default homepage, then go back, but that's tedious.
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Click to collapse
Actually I do that quite a bit. But you don't even have to. After you close all windows, it defaults to open a last page (Google home in my case), then just hit home cause there's nothing left to cache anyway, so back button or home button does the same thing, makes no difference.
hmm in my case it's also not the cache which makes the problems, but the "Data" of the browser app.
It easily exceeds 28MB!
And cache is only at 600kb, so clearing cache doesn't help.
Clearing the data helps. but it will delete all your bookmarks and other settings which is bull****.
Force closing the browser didn't help too (it helped in the past but interestingly not today).
Browser can not be installed on sd card. System updates can not be installed on external memory.
Sent from my Nexus One using XDA App
Shahpur.Azizpour said:
hmm in my case it's also not the cache which makes the problems, but the "Data" of the browser app.
It easily exceeds 28MB!
And cache is only at 600kb, so clearing cache doesn't help.
Clearing the data helps. but it will delete all your bookmarks and other settings which is bull****.
Force closing the browser didn't help too (it helped in the past but interestingly not today).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What? From apps, manage, all, find browser. Clear cache there. That does not clear up your 28M in ram?

browser screwing with my phones memory

I thought I read about this before but I couldn't find it through Google. My browser went from 6mb to 10mb and now its 16mb of data but I haven't added any bookmarks and I clear the cache regularly. So wtf. Phone is stock, native browser
AndroidPerson said:
I thought I read about this before but I couldn't find it through Google. My browser went from 6mb to 10mb and now its 16mb of data but I haven't added any bookmarks and I clear the cache regularly. So wtf. Phone is stock, native browser
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I haven't seen it get that big, but mine is always 6-10M when I look.. I really wish it limited itself and dumped the oldest data like any other browser cache does.
Restart your phone and the data will level out. Personally I had to reboot 3 times before it fixed itself. It's just one of those numerous Android quirks, they are relatively minor but annoying nonetheless
Search for the other thread on this, the browser was changed in froyo.

Browser Reset/Refresh when not active

Hello everyone.
My Bionic is my first android device and I'm having an issue with the web browser automatically refreshing the page when I leave the browser and then come back.
It will still be open to the page I was one but refreshed and back at the top.
I'm assuming this is a memory savings item so it doesn't have to hold the entire page in memory while the browser isn't active but it's very annoying when I'm partly through a page and having scroll back down and figure out where I was.
Is there a way to stop this behavior? I've seen the ability to add tasks to an "autokill" list that drops them within a few seconds of going inactive but nothing to make something permanent.
Thanks.
This is something I've had to deal with since Android, but it doesn't really bug me, because I can understand why. With my Bionic, this definitely doesn't happen as much as when I had my Droid X, since it has more RAM, but there very well could be some sort of way to get this to work. I know there are some task killer apps (but that makes it completely useless if our on an OS past 2.2+) that will allow you to keep apps in memory at all times, but other than that, I believe it does it just so your phone doesn't get bogged down with trying to keep a whole web page in memory.
That's what I figured.
I was reading a game walk through and then switching back to the game and I had to keep scrolling back down through the massive page to find where I left off.
I wonder if an alternative browser would be any better? I'll have to search the market.

Samsung Galaxy S mysterious ram usage cm10.1

Hey there, this problem might have been discussed before but I wasn't able to find it, so the problem is with ram usasage, I once went to the apps in settings and on the running apps I always see 250mb+ ram used by something, then I killed all the apps, but that just made a dliference of 50mb ram, It's real anoying because when I want to switch between apps it's slow and when I turn a browser back on after using aother app the page realoads which I guess wpuldn't happen with 300 mb ram, does anyone know the reason for this, I am currently running cm10.1.
Thanks!
ltkipras said:
Hey there, this problem might have been discussed before but I wasn't able to find it, so the problem is with ram usasage, I once went to the apps in settings and on the running apps I always see 250mb+ ram used by something, then I killed all the apps, but that just made a dliference of 50mb ram, It's real anoying because when I want to switch between apps it's slow and when I turn a browser back on after using aother app the page realoads which I guess wpuldn't happen with 300 mb ram, does anyone know the reason for this, I am currently running cm10.1.
Thanks!
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What ROM and Kernel are you using?
Mango Polo said:
What ROM and Kernel are you using?
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ROM; cm10.1 nigtly 20130330 galaxysmtd Kernel: 3.0.70-g7b668b [email protected] #1
Free RAM is useless. It just sits there sucking up power and being available in case you need it. It's pretty much a waste to have 300 MB of RAM and then only use 100 MB. Instead you should try to keep your RAM full at all times with the things you are likely to need in the near future. For example, if your phone is currently only using 20% of your RAM but already caches the browser in case you'll use it soon it will be faster to load the browser. If you decide to use the music player on the other hand the cached browser can be overwritten with the music player without requiring any additional time, so no harm is done.
Modern systems don't have "free" and "in use" RAM, they have "free" (wasted space), "in use" and "cached". You shouldn't look at the amount of free RAM but rather the amount of actually used RAM is a better indicator.
The reason you only gain 50 MB when you kill all apps is because only 50 MB will be actually in use by apps and all remaining unused space is used for caching things. If your phone is slow, this is not the cause of it. You may just have a slow phone or the ROM might be slow for some (other) reason.
Marshian said:
Free RAM is useless. It just sits there sucking up power and being available in case you need it. It's pretty much a waste to have 300 MB of RAM and then only use 100 MB. Instead you should try to keep your RAM full at all times with the things you are likely to need in the near future. For example, if your phone is currently only using 20% of your RAM but already caches the browser in case you'll use it soon it will be faster to load the browser. If you decide to use the music player on the other hand the cached browser can be overwritten with the music player without requiring any additional time, so no harm is done.
Modern systems don't have "free" and "in use" RAM, they have "free" (wasted space), "in use" and "cached". You shouldn't look at the amount of free RAM but rather the amount of actually used RAM is a better indicator.
The reason you only gain 50 MB when you kill all apps is because only 50 MB will be actually in use by apps and all remaining unused space is used for caching things. If your phone is slow, this is not the cause of it. You may just have a slow phone or the ROM might be slow for some (other) reason.
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yeah only 50mb is used to keep the apps running, but it probably takes up a whole lot more when using the apps, and this is a problem for me that it is slow to change between apps, and when I do change between the for example if I wanna text some one back while using a browser, once i turn the browser back on it restarts the page, and that didn't happen in my zte blade, unless I had some more apps running.
I wanna know what is using those 250+mb of ram!
ltkipras said:
yeah only 50mb is used to keep the apps running, but it probably takes up a whole lot more when using the apps, and this is a problem for me that it is slow to change between apps, and when I do change between the for example if I wanna text some one back while using a browser, once i turn the browser back on it restarts the page, and that didn't happen in my zte blade, unless I had some more apps running.
I wanna know what is using those 250+mb of ram!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
see exchange service,any svn services n keep track of system usage. normally 100mb+ will be taken for ui, framework...etc.
but. eventhough u keep track of it,then slaughter it, it will come back to life n running, so i wouldnt recommend slaughtering system usage.
switching between app normally slow for full or stock rom. try find some debloated rom. it will be suitable for u if u wanna more free ram rather than liquidity.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using xda app-developers app
I also observed some sluggishness after some time of usage. Sometimes the phone got totally unresponsive, not catching any push events (from buttons or screen), so that I couldn't even wake it after the screen timeout. I had to wait even few minutes before it was alive again.
Google Chrome was the most ram-eating app as far as I know.
Sometimes the best method is just restart your phone from time to time or even make a wipe - this is normal for all low-end android phones as they get sluggish after some time.
Long story short: I ended up buying a new phone with 2gb of RAM
pawci0 said:
I also observed some sluggishness after some time of usage. Sometimes the phone got totally unresponsive, not catching any push events (from buttons or screen), so that I couldn't even wake it after the screen timeout. I had to wait even few minutes before it was alive again.
Google Chrome was the most ram-eating app as far as I know.
Sometimes the best method is just restart your phone from time to time or even make a wipe - this is normal for all low-end android phones as they get sluggish after some time.
Long story short: I ended up buying a new phone with 2gb of RAM
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well...good luck on ur new fone
wish i had extra money to buy one......
but, bigger ram doesnt solve anything as far as i know.stock gapps n app from firmware will be da 'pacman' here. unless ur obtain 'god mode' for ur fone.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using xda app-developers app
I have the same issue
I'm using CM10.1 RC5, kernel 3.0.76-gc0a8d45 [email protected] #1
I have same symptoms pawci0 and ltkipras mentioned.
But I don't want to buy a new phone...
The lack of memory is noticeable when I run Waze or maps . It just opens for a couple of minutes and closes by itself or rather hangs the entire device.
What should I do? Go for the CM10.1 stable, try a different ROM (i.e. Slim). Change kernels?
nope, waze doesnt use that much ram, try to fix permission first n clear cache in recovery
n try to use other kernel, mine ok with multitask, rather heavy with online games n hearing mp3 n receiving whatsapp, line n we chat at da same time
n try greenify app to control app thats always running.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using xda premium
Just try a other rom or kernel you would be amazed how lets say a change of kernel can speed things up. The point is everyone uses their phone differently different apps and things so you need to find the rom that suits you mostly.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using xda app-developers app

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