Drastic (7x) increase in startup time when using external storage

[Steven S]

Environment

• Accordance 2.2.3 (13728)
• Android 11 (kernel 4.9.227)

 

Description

I recently changed Accordance on my Android device from using internal storage to using my SD card (via Settings > Storage). Prior to this change, the Accordance startup time was less than ten seconds. However, after the change, it now takes approximately 70 seconds. I also noticed other strange behavior, such as icons not showing up next to tools and texts (a default icon is used rather than the corresponding cover image), and long delays in tool content showing up in the instant details window (sometimes it would take five or six attempts for my configured dictionary to display when opening instant details).

 

The SD card I was using when I made this change is a bit older, and it was at 75% capacity, so I upgraded the card to one that supports faster transfer rates and, after moving the content of the old card, is below 25% capacity. Unfortunately, Accordance still clocks in with the 70-second startup time, but, even worse, it subsequently crashes after the startup wait (probably related to me simply copying the content from one card to another rather than mirroring them).

 

My third attempt, still using the new SD card, was to uninstall and reinstall Accordance without bringing down anything from Easy Install. I configured Accordance to use the SD card (of which the vanilla install only uses 154 MiB), but, once again, the startup time increased to almost 70 seconds (along with the other issues noted in the first paragraph).

 

So, my question is, Is there a known issue on Android whereby Accordance runs drastically slower when configured to use external storage? I understand that there is a difference in transfer speed and access times between internal and external storage, but an almost 7x increase in startup time makes me think Accordance is doing a lot of I/O that might be able to be made more efficient via the use of a cache or something, but that's just a guess as to what the root cause may be.

 

Any other advice for using external storage on Android would be appreciated. The point of this exercise is so that I can have more Accordance resources available on my phone, since that's the device I always have with me. I'd be more than happy to trade off a 2x (or even 3x) decrease in performance for the increase in storage space, but 7x is pushing it a bit. 

 

Note that the following issue is possibly related: