URL: Staiola.studio/apps/ostromo

I have noticed pretty frequent lag on my 2019 NVIDIA Shield Pro. I have done new thermal paste, I have reinstalled the operating system, and I ran ATV Optimizer to remove all of the bloat from it. I am using the Projectivity launcher. I still experience lag when I'm using Plex, where the user interface is very slow and sometimes takes 30 to 60 seconds to load from direct play files on my NAS device. I basically have to reboot the device at least every day. Otherwise, the whole interface is slow. I had Claude monitor the logs and look into it, and this is what it says (see below). I really like the Shield, but I'm wondering if it's time to upgrade to something else.

Tonight’s snapshot (10/27, 9:00 PM)

Memory status: critical

Swap is completely full: 524,284K used out of 524,284K total — zero headroom left

media.codec (native video decoder) is the single largest process at 695MB RSS — an all-time high in the log

Free RAM down to ~440MB

Uptime: 9 days, 19 hours — still no restart since the last one

The smoking gun: media.codec keeps climbing, never shrinks

Looking at every entry where it was captured:

Date Uptime media.codec RSS

10/25 10:40 AM 7d 8h 496MB

10/25 9:00 PM 7d 19h 531MB

10/27 9:00 PM 9d 19h 695MB

It only ever grows, tracking almost linearly with uptime, not with how much you’re actively watching. That’s a classic native memory leak in the Tegra video decode service — core platform code, not something a debloat or app setting can fix.

Why it hit both Plex and the Android interface tonight

This explains the exact symptom you described. Once swap is 100% exhausted and the system is flagged “critical,” Android has no slack left for new memory allocations — every app launch, frame buffer, or UI transition has to fight for scraps, which stalls Plex playback and basic launcher navigation at the same time. That’s not two separate problems; it’s one: the device ran 9+ days without a reboot, and media.codec quietly ate almost 700MB in that stretch, leaving nothing else to work with.

The actual fix

This isn’t fixable by tweaking Plex or debloating further — it’s a platform-level leak that only clears on reboot. The practical fix is a scheduled periodic restart before it reaches this point — say, every 4–5 days rather than waiting until it’s unusable. Want me to set that up (a weekly or twice-weekly auto-restart at a low-usage hour), so you stop having to do it manually and it never builds up to critical again?

Is the serial number on the exterior of the unit also embedded in flash memory on the actual main board itself ? To counter parts harvesting.

Thanks in advance

As tittle says whenever I'm using the app the home button doesn't led me home and double pressing it to go to app switcher doesn't work either. I don't have any button remapping open and the app itself doesn't show any setting for button remapping