I’ve been having some serious performance problems with my fairphone (wait times of 1 minute or more before apps open or switching apps, and general lack of responsiveness).
During times of poor peformance, it show’s CPU and Disk I/O getting maxed out, but no app seems to be responsible. Here’s some screenshots taken during poor performance moments.
As you can see, the system is getting maxed out, but I can’t see any process responsible.
The problem has gotten so bad lately that I’m even having trouble with battery life - the phone dies within an 1 hour.
How can I go about troubleshooting this and finding out the processes responsible?
Are you running System Monitor Lite as Root/SuperUser? If it’s running without these privileges then it probably won’t be allowed to see some processes.
Jord is quite right here. We need to find out if the monitoring program is allowed to see all running processes.
If it is, then there are some hidden processes running. By my understanding, any process that hides itself from root is a malicious one.
Thanks Guys, It’s unclear if System Monitor Lite shows root processes. It
has a request root option, but only on it’s App Cache calculator page, so
it’s unclear if that is only applied to process monitoring also, or only
the Cache calculations.
Can anyone recommend a simple process monitor I could use that does monitor
root processes?
You could try OS Monitor and check the “Expert Mode” box in the settings. For me, it means that the number of checked processes rises from 45 to 160, so I guess that it captures all system (root) processes.
Thanks everyone. I tried the monitoring tools, still no sign of the runaway process.
AVG also comes up clean.
Any other suggestions on how to trace this process? I’d prefer to figure out what it is and how it got there before I reset, lest I end up in the same place again a few months down the road.
Are there any tools that can give a breakdown of disk io per process?
Jokes aside I would say that HackAR is right - trying another analysing tool will probably not help. On the other hand, a complete sweep might not be necessary. I would probably try the following:
uninstall the apps I’ve installed myself, one by one, and see what happens (probably necessary to reboot after each uninstall). A bit time-consuming, but with luck the culprit is found early.
Isn’t your option 2 more serious than your option 3? Installing the OS only “refreshes” the system files, whilst a hard reset also erases user data such as photos, music, etc. stored on the internal storage, or am I mistaken?
Yes, that sounds reaoonable. However, if the phone is infected so that hidden processes are running, the logical first step for me is to get rid of everything installed after the phone left the factory, i.e. a hard reset. If the problem still persists, the infection must have affected the system files, in which case reflashing ought to fix it.
Pure guesswork from my side now (since I’m not knowledgeablem enough), but yes: if we suppose that there are some protected, read-only image files stored on the phone that cannot be corrupted, then of course a hard reset ought to be enough and my 3rd step above will be unneccessary.
A complete sweep and reinstall might help, but nothing can stop them from entering your phone again.
Well, let’s see how many of the three steps