Stability/performance degrade over time?

[Frorsteig]

Does stability and/or performance typically degrade over time on a jailbroken iPad?

I used the Spirit jailbreak and had installed SBsettings, Notifier, Backgrounder, BTstack GPS, Fake Carrier and Circuitous. It worked fine for a good while, but over the past few weeks had begun freezing, crashing, responding slowly and just felt generally more unstable. Is this typical of a jailbreak over time or did I manage to have a bad combination of installed apps? I did keep the ones installed up to date with new revisions.

Currently have restored and it feels snappy again, but I do miss some of the advantages of the jailbreak, it had unfortunately swung to the point where the disadvantages outweighed the advantages.

[Cory Gillmore]

Yes this is true with any computing device. Jailbroken or not. Over time as you install and uninstall various apps, the devices file system becomes cluttered with folders. It's a good idea to do a full restore and setup as new with all the idevices. Especially if jailbroken. Hell, I even do a clean install of Windows every few months on my PC's to keep them fresh and snappy.

[crazyalaa]

Wow, I thought that I would be the only one to have this sort of issue. I mean the iPad was blazing fast when I got it, but now its much slower, and this issue also happens with my iPhone!!

[FerrariCUBU]

This is true. A restore every once in a while always helps out my iDevices.

[tuckers]

My iPad is not jailbroken, and it doesn't crash or slow down.

[Cory Gillmore]

My iPad is not jailbroken, and it doesn't crash or slow down.

That's cause you're not cool like the other cool kids. All the cool kids have to restore their devices every few months because their device simply cannot handle their extreme coolness.

[Frorsteig]

My question is more if jailbreaking itself introduces instability. There really shouldn't be a need to reinstall/restore with a vanilla setup. All my other computers (iMac, Windows XP, Ubuntu) have all done fine for years without any need reinstall the operating system. As well as my first gen iPod touch.

The situation with the iPad has been unusual for me. Before Apple updated the for the iPhone and iPod touch to include a application SDK, I had jailbroken my iPod and it was fine until the official OS became more useful (at which time I updated to that). Granted there weren't as sophisticated programs for multitasking and other more base level interactions with the OS then.