Why apps are launching slowly?

Question

This issue happens on all of my devices no matter what operating system is on it. Apps launch slowly, however the resources monitor says that CPU and RAM are not busy that much.



For instance, I installed a resources monitor floating widget on my Sony Xperia M2. What I found out that before I tap on a big app like FaceBook, the CPU usage is 3% and there are 370MB free RAM available. Then when I tap on the FaceBook app, the CPU usage started to vary within the range of 50~60% and the free RAM was changing within the range 300~350MB. However the app was still laggy, unlike higher-end Sony phone like Xperia Z2.



Briefly, the question is, why my phone is not functioning as fast as a higher-end phone of the same OS and brand even though it has 40% free CPU and 300MB of free RAM, why isn't it using 80 or 90% of the processor and the same in RAM?


— McLovin | Sources

Answer

The most probable answer is the speed of the NVRAM (or hard drive).



When an application loads, it needs to read the application into memory - Hard drives and sd cards (but not so much SSD cards) are very slow to read and write, and this is most likely the bottleneck.



A typical hard drive has a read speed of 100 Megabytes per second and SD card can vary greatly but would be typically much slower then a hard drive. I have been unable to find the type of built in storage in the M2, but it looks like a very budget phone (540x960 pixels) so I imagine they have skimped on the speed of the storage on it to keep the price down. That said, if you are running apps from an SD card, you may benefit (speedwise) from moving them back to the internal storage, or investing in higher speed sd card. (A class 4 card is a LOT slower then a class 10 SD card)


— davidgo | Sources

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