A one year old Kindle three needs to be reset

[jbcohen]

Last night my kindle was not allowing me to side load any books and would not allow me to use the wifi so I called did a chat session with tech support and they had me reboot the device and now all is well. My question about the incident is this: Why would a kindle three need to be rebooted?

[morantis]

There are many reasons why a device of this type would need a reset and in the end they don't make much sense to us. Technically the OS should run forever without any issue, but this is not true. The same can be said for a simple car engine, it should be able to run without oil or transmission fluid, but the reality is that heat and friction build up, along with dirt and other things.

In the OS there are caches of information, services that don't start on a command call, and things of this nature. A computer is far far more logical than a human, but at the same time, mistakes happen and things get a little messed up. A reboot should be high in the list of first things to try, and if it works, then should shrug and move on, unless it has to be done frequently.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by jbcohen

Last night my kindle was not allowing me to side load any books and would not allow me to use the wifi so I called did a chat session with tech support and they had me reboot the device and now all is well. My question about the incident is this: Why would a kindle three need to be rebooted?

You meat Restart or Factory Reset? I recently had to do a factory reset on my K3 that is over a year old. All Kindles need to be Restarted every now and then like any computer. My problem was my K3 keeps losing it's indexing. After I did a reset it seems to be working like new again.

[geekmaster]

The Kindle framework does not free dynamic memory allocations until it is reset. Eventually it runs out of free memory, and it may even restart itself in some cases.

[HomeInMyShoes]

Originally Posted by jbcohen

Last night my kindle was not allowing me to side load any books and would not allow me to use the wifi so I called did a chat session with tech support and they had me reboot the device and now all is well. My question about the incident is this: Why would a kindle three need to be rebooted?

I need to reboot mine in order to get it to charge most times. It's an annoyance.

[pidgeon92]

It's a little computer, and it gets software glitches the same as a big computer, and restarting it, or worse, reinstalling the system software (or in the case of the Kindle, a less drastic Factory Reset) is the only way to get it working again.

[geekmaster]

http://www.cowlark.com/kindle/combined.html

... The Kindle is a very fragile device. It's incredibly easy to crash; there's no isolation between user applications and the system user interface. ... Whenever you load a class containing static members, the memory used for those members will never be freed. Ever. ... This means that slow memory leaks over time that you would never notice on a desktop will slowly build up. ... you're very likely to see slow bit rot, where the device will slowly destabilise over time until it crashes and reboots, at which point it goes back to normal and then starts to slowly destabilise over time ...

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by geekmaster

http://www.cowlark.com/kindle/combined.html

How often should we restart? My K4 will just freeze when it runs out of memory.

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by Blossom

How often should we restart? My K4 will just freeze when it runs out of memory.

It depends on how many apps you use, and how well they are written. Poorly written code has more "memory leaks" and will require restarts more often. Now that the developer's corner has supplied tools and sample code to make kindle development much easier than it was in the past, we can expect (and have seen) a lot more poor-quality hacks, but there are also a lot more good-quality hacks as well. Just be careful to use stuff from trusted sources (such as the wikis, and the sticky threads in the developer's corner forum).

Even the best code can have slow memory and resource leaks, due to the way that amazon designed and implemented the kindles. Some of the leaks are in the amazon code. Even the best code available can have resource leaks, but they usually go unnoticed on desktop PCs that are not expected to run for weeks or months at a time without reboots.

In your kindle, you can check the amount of free memory in the settings menu, if you wish to manually restart before it locks up.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by geekmaster

It depends on how many apps you use, and how well they are written. Poorly written code has more "memory leaks" and will require restarts more often. Now that the developer's corner has supplied tools and sample code to make kindle development much easier than it was in the past, we can expect (and have seen) a lot more poor-quality hacks, but there are also a lot more good-quality hacks as well. Just be careful to use stuff from trusted sources (such as the wikis, and the sticky threads in the developer's corner forum).

Even the best code can have slow memory and resource leaks, due to the way that amazon designed and implemented the kindles. Some of the leaks are in the amazon code. Even the best code available can have resource leaks, but they usually go unnoticed on desktop PCs that are not expected to run for weeks or months at a time without reboots.

In your kindle, you can check the amount of free memory in the settings menu, if you wish to manually restart before it locks up.

I only use my K4 for reading. The only hack if it could be called that is Calibre's Kindle Collections plugin to change to a custom font and margins.

[Edward M. Grant]

Originally Posted by Blossom

All Kindles need to be Restarted every now and then like any computer.

In my day job we rebooted one of our servers recently when we realised we hadn't done so since 2009 and thought it was about time we checked that it still worked. My Kindle, on the other hand, sometimes requires a reboot three times a night.

In my case I suspect that it's caching e-book info in RAM so that now I have 2,000+ e-books on there it doesn't have enough RAM left to do everything else. I've been deleting books that I'm unlikely to read any time soon in order to free up memory and hopefully stop it locking up.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by Edward M. Grant

In my day job we rebooted one of our servers recently when we realised we hadn't done so since 2009 and thought it was about time we checked that it still worked. My Kindle, on the other hand, sometimes requires a reboot three times a night.

In my case I suspect that it's caching e-book info in RAM so that now I have 2,000+ e-books on there it doesn't have enough RAM left to do everything else. I've been deleting books that I'm unlikely to read any time soon in order to free up memory and hopefully stop it locking up.

I only have about 150 books on mine. I can't imagine having as many as 2000 on there. I use Dropbox for the rest of my library. I keep all my books on my personal cloud so they will sync with my other Kindles.

[Edward M. Grant]

Originally Posted by Blossom

I only have about 150 books on mine. I can't imagine having as many as 2000 on there.

Well, it has 4GB of Flash, so I thought I might as well fill it. But if you try to use all that storage it becomes less and less happy.

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by Edward M. Grant

Well, it has 4GB of Flash, so I thought I might as well fill it. But if you try to use all that storage it becomes less and less happy.

The problem with too many books is that the collections database can grow too large. This is MUCH worse on the K4(mini) and K5(touch), which moved the collections database from the USB drive to the much smaller (30MB) persistent user store (/var/local), that is also where log files and other stuff is written. When that gets full, the kindle bricks. There are fixes for that in the developer's corner. One way is to copy the collections database to the USB drive and replace the original copy with a symlink pointing to the file on the USB drive. After bricking, a debricking method includes zeroing out the 30MB partition containing the collections database (/dev/mmcblk0p3), but you can lose your collections database that way.

It is much easier to just limit how many books you put on your kindle, but there have been reports that you can brick the K4 or K5 by synchronizing to an amazon account that has too many books in it.

[Edward M. Grant]

Ouch, that's much worse than I thought. At least when mine locks up a reboot does get it going again.