Acer Tablet Resurrection

About 6 months after I bought it (used), my Acer A500 tablet was having problems. My Acer A100 also had the same problems and the same fix worked. This may affect other Acer tablets as well.

  • App crashes becoming more frequent
  • Upon waking up, would "hang" with extremely slow response for several minutes
  • Settings/Storage reported only 2 GB of space remaining, but sum of individual areas (apps, misc, etc.) indicated there should be 7GB of free space remaining

    • The Symptoms

    The symptoms were not evenly spread. Certain apps were consistently affected with increasing frequency, while other apps remained unaffected. Some examples:

    Google Earth: starts up, then just as it starts to zoom into the Earth, the screen flickers and the app hangs.
    Email: occasional app hangs, apparently random, becoming increasingly frequent.
    Calendar: same as Email, with screen flicker similar to Google Earth.
    Sygic: frequent crashes, typically after start-up while zooming into a route.

    The Solution

    Long story short, the problem was caused by system GPS logs hogging up the storage space. These logs are in protected system folders, so they don't show up in system/storage. If the tablet is not rooted, the only solution is to wipe it entirely and load from scratch. But if the tablet is rooted, you can easily delete the offending files and reconfigure the GPS to turn off the logging.

    This appears to be a big problem with how Acer ports Android to their tablets. They set the GPS into debug logging mode, so it creates files every 20 to 90 minutes. Eventually these files accumulate, hog all the storage the the device becomes unusable. Unless the tablet is rooted, there is no way to delete them. The only option for the un-rooted user is to wipe the entire tablet.

    The Fix

    This fix requires the tablet to be rooted. To Acer's credit, rooting their tablets is simple, safe and easy.

    The GPS logging files accumulate here:
    /data/gps/gl-YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS.txt
    New ones seem to appear every 10 to 90 minutes, each varying from around 100k to over 1 MB in size. If you are experiencing the above symptoms, you are likely to find thousands of these files.

    Open a terminal and delete them, as follows:
    Open any terminal app, like "Android Terminal Emulator" by Jack Palevich.
    Enter the following command:
    rm -fr /data/gps/gl-*.txt
    It may take a few minutes for it to complete; it's got a lot of work to do.

    Next, you should turn off GPS logging so these files stop appearing. This way you won't have to repeat this process every month or so. The file that configures the GPS logging is here:
    /etc/gps/gpsconfig.xml
    In this file, around line 7 or so you will see:
    cLogEnabled="true"
    Using a text editor, change that to false and save the file.

    Next, you should run "fstrim" on your /data partition. I don't know whether this step is necessary on Acer tablets. Whether or not it's necessary, it doesn't hurt anything. You can do this with a free app called "LagFix" by Grilled Monkey. This can take a long time - several minutes or more.

    Next, you should restart - cold reboot - your tablet.
    You're done. All of the above symptoms are gone, performance and reliability are restored.