16GB Nexus 7 Can't Perform With Storage Nearly Full?

Not to get personal, but I thought it was just me. When I first received the Google Nexus 7 tablet, it was simply badass, even more so compared to my Kindle Fire (which was tossed over to my wife). But since then, the tablet's performance has glaringly slowed to a crawl, turning into a disappointing, worthless piece of junk. That may be harsh, but the before and after is like night and day, and as a consumer who shelled out $250 for the 16 GB version, I expect a quality product.

It seems that my Nexus 7 tablet no longer has spunk.

Mind you I'm horribly obsessive about performance. Just like on the PC, I make sure nothing is running in the background that will steal a single frame from my games. Android is no different, and while I like the way Ice Cream Sandwich will allow applications to run simultaneously in the background, I make sure they're all nuked so I can get every drop of juice from Nvidia's quad core Tegra 3.

But now it seems that I'm not the only one who's noticed the performance degradation. The Register has an interesting article that describes the same problem, only the information is based on various forums where annoyed customers have flocked to provide their complaints. Apparently the problem exists only on the 16 GB model, and when the storage capacity falls below 2 GB.

Technically device owners only have 13 GB of internal storage to use – the rest is eaten up by Android. Unlike many Android smartphones, that 13 GB is reserved for apps, their data, multimedia and so on. Unfortunately, 13 GB isn't really enough for the Android gamer, especially when playing Gameloft titles. As an example, N.O.V.A. 3 eats up 1.99 GB, whereas Modern Combat 3 eats up 1.47 GB. Order and Chaos, Gameloft's World of Warcraft mobile knock-off, consumes 0.92 GB. With just those three Gameloft games alone, I've lost 4.38 GB.

"So here I am, stuck with a device that is labeled for 16 GB storage, that in reality only has just over 13 GB of storage ... but due to performance issues, REALLY only has 9-10 GB of storage available for content and software," writes one angry Nexus 7 owner.

"Ever since I got my Nexus 7 I noticed it was a little on the slow side, when playing 3D games I experienced a lot of freezing and issues when it was loading in new textures but more recently I've noticed these issues get worse," writes another owner. "Downloading an app is tremendously slow with it taking several minutes to download just a few meg while my phone completes the same task in seconds."

"I've seen reports of this linked with poor IO transfer benchmarks," another owner writes who saw a performance increase after disabling Currents and freeing up 2 GB of cache. "Current best guess seems to be that the device is having trouble writing and reading cache during background tasks and is slowing down everything else. Thing is it ran like a particularly greased up Usain Bolt for the first few months. I was sure it was some sort of app I'd installed messing things up but I can't isolate it at all, and it manifests as high IO usage. It really is incredibly annoying, with Chrome habitually showing the "Not Responding" dialogue, and Google Now becoming Google Eventually."

For the record, AndroBench produced these results on my Nexus 7:

SEQ RD: 4.69 MB/s
SEQ WR: 0.31 MB/s
RND RD: 1.33 MB/s, 340.82 IOPS(4K)
RND WR: 0.03 MB/s, 9.05 IOPS(4K)

SQLite
Insert: 2.75 TPS
Update: 30.93 TPS
Delete: 20.31 TPS

The great thing with AndroBench is that it will compare your scores to other devices. Apparently my sequential write of 0.31 MB/s is slower than the Nexus 7 which is ranked at #1 with 23.02 MB/s. Random read is also supposed to be around 1843.89 IOPS(4), but mine lists as 340.82 IOPS(4K). That said, the tablet's horrid performance isn't simply my imagination, and it's not the imagination of numerous other users complaining about slowdown on various forums.

Note this benchmark was performed with 1.2 GB of free internal space out of 13 GB. After deleting some app cache, I ran the benchmark again with 2.1 GB of free space. The results still shows less than optimal performance, but better than before:

SEQ RD: 27.36 MB/s
SEQ WR: 11.06 MB/s
RND RD: 6.54 MB/s, 1676.15 IOPS(4K)
RND WR: 0.1 MB/s, 28.15 IOPS(4K)

SQLite
Insert: 29.9 TPS
Update: 22.86 TPS
Delete: 29.33 TPS

Alright, let's clear up to 3 GB of free space, disable Currents sync in the background (which consumes a lot of data), and see what happens:

SEQ RD: 29.69 MB/s
SEQ WR: 0.75 MB/s
RND RD: 8.03 MB/s, 2056.55 IOPS(4K)
RND WR: 0.14 MB/s, 237.12 IOPS(4K)

SQLite
Insert: 7.97 TPS
Update: 29.59 TPS
Delete: 20.49 TPS

For the record, AndroBench claims the Nexus 7 should perform like this:

SEQ RD: n/a
SEQ WR: 22.78 MB/s
RND RD: 1842.62 IOPS(4K)
RND WR: 6157.93 IOPS(4K)

SQLite
Insert: 205.28 TPS
Update: 166.25 TPS
Delete: 215.15 TPS

Even after clearing up to 3 GB of space and turning off Currents, the performance is still sluggish. While the sequential read seemingly has improved, the sequential write still remains low. In fact, even the random write speeds are suspiciously low, leaving me to wonder if something is going on in regards to writing to the flash – could this be why downloads are taking so long as other users have suggested?

So far Google hasn't responded to queries over the Nexus 7 16 GB slowdown. Hopefully these numbers will help shed some light on the situation.