Useful to restart?

Hello,

I would like to knwo if it’s useful to restart the telephone from time to time ?

Thanks.

I restart my phone every day. I imagine it’s good for the phone to clear temporary memory, etc. I usually do it when I plug the charger in when I get home.

Definetly a worthwhie idea, but how often is another issue.

For some once a week is more than enough for some far too often even once a month :slight_smile:

Howver apps store info and data in a cache, on the internal memory. It can be helpful and even necessary to purge this now and then. Switching the phone off doesn’t do that which I consider far more important in terms of not having a clogged up phone fraying at the edges.

Which every way you decide to ‘refresh’ some aspects of the phone ensure you do not have an SD card formatted to extend the internal memory.

All the best

This is not really an FP4 question of help is it, more a discussion of the general idea ???

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At least once a month to install the latest update, that’s about the frequency I reboot my FP4. My previous phone got custom ROM updates every other week or so, so a reboot every two weeks it was. It was quite slow at the end of its life, but rebooting didn’t speed it up at all :slight_smile:

Apart from that it doesn’t matter too much. If you ever notice a slow down or an increase in batter drain you can just reboot your phone then and there and if a reboot could have prevented it, a reboot will fix it, no harm done. Every day seems a bit excessive. We live in 2022, while not perfect, software and hardware are pretty solid at this point. I haven’t noticed any drawbacks of rebooting once every 4 weeks (for updates), but once every (other) week might be a good starting point.

Haven’t looked into any papers on this topic though

Edit: Even rebooting every day will not guarantee you that you will never run into issues that a reboot can fix

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The OS is perfectly capable to do garbage collection by itself :slight_smile: It doesn’t need help from you or 3rd party apps that claim to do so.

Only reboot if you really have to (update, bugs, runs hot).

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Remember, its not Windows

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Strongly agreed. You are probably slowing things down by rebooting, because the OS does cache things in memory (free memory is wasted memory), and every time you reboot you throw all of that away and the cache has to be repopulated (though, admittedly, running off an SSD as the phone does that’s not going to take perceptible time).

Android phones are Linux systems (weird ones, but still). Linux systems are perfectly happy to run for months, years, you name it without rebooting. I’ve run some that ran for years without rebooting, heck in one case a decade (not really recommended, but this was an isolated embedded system that nobody could hack into and rebooting it would have been ferociously annoying and require literally removing a number of physical rivets).

Hell, the Linux system I’m typing this reply on has an uptime of about nine months now (yes, I need to upgrade! but there’s no other reason to reboot, not really, not unless something goes visibly wrong that you think a reboot might fix).

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Thank you for all your responses.

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In my case, it restarts by itself at least once a week :wink:
(Fairphone 4 - latest version)

I would agree in theory (and also administer Linux systems that sometimes accumulate long uptimes), but in practice if I use my FP3 a lot, especially after the Android 11 update, it starts to get slow, apps reload every time I switch to them, sometimes the screen freezes for 10 seconds or more… all of which is fixed (temporarily) by a reboot.
As you said Android is a weird kind of Linux, and my impression is that Fairphone OS is a weird kind of Android.
So: don’t reboot unless you have a reason. But if you think you may have a reason, a reboot often helps.

Fairphone OS is an extremely-close-to-stock Android, as these things go.

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So I’ve heard, and still it has issues I don’t see in other Android phones. Anyway, my point was that reboots often help with some of these issues.

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Which proves that it’s not simply or equal to a pure “Linux distribution” as being run on Notebooks, Desktops or Servers. Android is based on a modified Linux kernel by Google.
Would anyone accept such an unreliable behavior on anything different than a mobile?
Not me.
So yes, Android does need a reboot once in a while. If not done manually it will somwhen run into a circumstance simply rebooting itself for unknown reasons. Most users experiencing random reboots cannot identify any obvious causes.
Linux distributions running on the official kernel in fact are known for stability and long uptimes.

I guess that’s a state Android will never ever reach if it hasn’t by now.

Most, if not all Linux distributions modify the kernel. And then of course there are the compile options, libc version and other dependencies, which differs with each distro as well. Google merged the Android code into the mainline kernel a long time ago already. Every major Linux distribution uses a stable release of the Linux kernel, including Android. Reboots are not mandatory. Reboot when experiencing bugs, overheating or when your phone has an update that requires a reboot. Just like with a “normal” Linux system. It’s true that Fairphone and some other vendors are not super stable. But my Pixel 3 could easily last a month without issues, then a reboot was needed for the timely monthly updates. So Android is stable, but there are many factors that can change that, such as the vendor, carrier and chipset modifications.

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Have you had a look at this?

I had the same problem but I found a workaround explained in that thread.

Ciao,
Max

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