I am keeping my dashboard loaded in Fully Kiosk Browser all the time, on a portable monitor driven by an Odroid C4 running Android. I run the screen saver after a period of inactivity, and stop the screensaver upon motion. This works well most of the time. But I’ve noticed that, after a while, the dashboard gets pretty sluggish. Reloading the dashboard in Fully Kiosk Browser immediately resolves the slugglishness. Which makes me wonder what could be causing this and if there’s a way to address it besides forcing a periodic refresh of the dashboard?
In for suggestions. I’ve noticed the same thing with FKB.
If you’re using kiosk browser with a rooted device I believe there’s an option for an automatic daily restart. Perhaps it’s even in the android tablet settings if you have one.
A simple refresh of the web page suffices to restore the dashboard to its pre-sluggish state. No need for a complete restart of the underlying device. My question is whether there’s something that can be done to resolve the underlying problem, rather than hack the problem with a periodic browser refresh.
I’m having trouble identifying any sort of pattern to the sluggishness, even with daily refreshes. Sometimes it will be fine. Sometimes not. Hack might require me to refresh every few hours…
Reloading the URL every hour has so far kept the sluggishness away. Hopeful that will at least cover up the problem.
Sorry to hear that things get sluggish over time on your Odroid C4 running Fully Kiosk Browser on Android. Can you share some more details about the setup on the device?
From a quick glance of the Odroid documentation, it looks like Android Pie (9) is the officially supported Android version for the device. Are you running that official version from the Odroid site?
It looks like that version of the OS doesn’t officially support Google Play. Have you side-loaded Google Play onto the device or did you just download Fully Kiosk Browser directly from the Fully Kiosk website?
One of the things we’ve seen on Fire tablets (particularly older generations) is that side loading Google Play can cause the devices to get sluggish… but it’s more of a general sluggishness that seems to occur over time.
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Another important factor could be which browser engine it’s running under the hood. Fully Kiosk Browser uses whatever webview is set as the default on the device. On Fire Tablets, you’re stuck with whatever version ships with the version Fire OS that the device is running. On modern Android devices that ship with Google Play, the system can automatically update the WebView from Google Play… and better yet, many of those devices can use Google Chrome as their webview source.
The reason the webview is important is it’s responsible for how things are rendered, how code is processed, how memory management is done (eg. garbage collection). So newer webview versions tend to be much more performant than older versions. And often times they’ll fix issues like memory leaks and other related issues.
Yes.
Downloaded FKB directly from their site.
That I’ll have to look into more. I haven’t loaded Google Play. It’s got Lightning as the native browser, which I suspect is the default browser. Don’t know if that tells you anything helpful.
Most web browsers use the built in system ‘WebView’ rather than writing their own browser engine. If I remember correctly, Firefox is one of the few exceptions who has their own browser engine on Android.
Fully Kiosk Browser has an option within the settings to see which WebView is being used: Settings → Advanced Web Settings → Select WebView Implementation
For reference, my Pixel 4 is running Android System WebView 89.0.4389.105
I haven’t personally tinkered with the Odroid devices, so unfortunately I don’t have a lot of suggestions for what else to try. Ideally, getting the WebView as up to date as possible to rule out a memory leak would be helpful.
I see Android System WebView 66.0.3359.158. Not sure what that means, but there it is. I happened to notice an option to pause the webview when the screensaver is on. That’s interesting because I turn the screensaver on when there’s no motion. Wonder if that would help…
Give it a try and let us know what you find out!
The other approach would be to try simplifying things as much as possible and add on tweaks little by little. Start with the simplest settings possible in FKB just showing the dashboard all the time. Then layer in extra things like screensaver, etc.
Similarly, you might try just running a normal browser as a test. Since the device seems to ship with somewhat of an esoteric browser, you might try something more common like Firefox for Android - especially since the APK can be installed directly.