The Prairie Pooch Hole
When I first got the iPhone it was fun and I used it a lot; but as time went on, it simply would not connect to local Wi-Fi networks, and without that connection it wasn't very useful as a pocket computer.
There were other problems, and I began to tire of the iPhone. Someone suggested that I do a hard reboot. For reasons I don't recall I thought that a good idea, but I didn't do it. A few days later I was in the Apple Store in Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks. I didn't have an appointment, so it wasn't possible to talk to anyone about the iPhone; but as I was about to leave I thought about the advice I'd been given, and tried the hard boot.
To do that you hold down the front button — the only button on the iPhone that you generally use — and the little black button bar on the top of the iPhone. Hold both down as the machine shuts down. Ignore the "Slide to shut down" message and continue to hold down both buttons until the iPhone cycles and the Apple appears on screen. Let go both buttons and wait until the phone comes up.
In my case when the machine came back up there were two differences: it had more bars of telephone signal strength, and it immediately connected to the local network. Moreover, everything seemed to work not only properly, but better. More to the point, everything has worked better ever since.
I am told that the iPhone needs that hard reboot every couple of weeks. I have also been given a number of theories on why, including the obvious one that it gets filled with software goop and has bad garbage collection. I wouldn't know. What I can say is that it does no harm, doesn't take long, and in my experience makes the iPhone work much better: I get more bars, applications are crisper, and the Wi-Fi connects more strongly. I now do a hard reboot every week. You might want to try that.
Roland Dobbins adds:
The likely culprit on the iPhone is memory leakage; OSX on the Mac leaks like a sieve, although certain RAM-hungry programs such as Adobe LightRoom can be run occasionally purely as garbage collectors (they seem to do something in terms of memory allocation which ends up freeing a lot of RAM). This is probably what's happening on the iPhone; someone who has jailbroken his iPhone could probably confirm this using the various OSX tools available to monitor system status.
That, I suspect, explains why I have to reboot the iMac 29 every now and then; if I don't it gets sluggish.
The User's Column, October, 2008
Column 340, Part 1
Jerry Pournelle jerryp@jerrypournelle.com
Copyright 2008 Jerry E. Pournelle, Ph.D.
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