This FAQ is written to help those who are solely affected with PIM related issues and have no idea how to get rid of it.


PIM.

What is PIM?

PIM stands for Personal Information Management services, where it is the key component in making your BlackBerry 10 devices talk to the internet on what it transacts (upload and download).

Every time your phone has an app that tries to sync, PIM services is invoked. That includes apps like BBM, Evernote, etc.

If you ever face an issue where PIM services is eating up RAM as high as 100-400MB, or CPU resources from 30-70% (possible) of your CPU power, then you know something is wrong with PIM services and you need to check for the offending app.

Imagine it like this.

If you take a sponge, and shove it down to a plastic bottle, the sponge will fit. But the problem is that, liquid flow is severly restricted. If you want to permit a certain flow, you need to carve a path in that sponge, like via a straw tube, or something. But the flow there would be faster than the one that does not go through the straw. PIM is exactly the straw, and the bottle is your internet. You can only ram in so much before the device has to make decisions on what gets synced on priority.

Back to the analogy of the straw in the sponge in the bottle, the problem here is that something is cut off, and therefore blocking access from either outside or inside of the bottle (in this case, the app isn't syncing because it failed, one way or another)


Therefore, the only solution you have, is to find each app, and disable syncing.


Experience shows that:


Evernote
Android version of FaceBook
Tango
Viber
Android version of WeChat
Android version of Naver Line


will have tendency to have failed PIM services because they are uploading things that you probably don't want them to upload anyway (such as your browsing habits, your history of apps, etc) but the other side is confused and keeps saying "repeat please?" and therefore your battery life suffers.


In light of this, its actually advisable that once you have a stable installation of apps, every time you install a new app, do look at the CPU and Memory usage, and determine if the new APP (as opposed to the compilation of apps that you use) actually hogs the PIM and memory and CPU power or not. Even BBM can fall into this trap (oddly enough as it is), and you should check what you can do about it.

Other noteworthy things to check out for:

- permissions to connect to BBM
- permissions to connect to Google / Facebook
- permissions to upload information to some server


If your app is native Cascades, you can disable it. In one odd case somebody downloaded a calculator (normally people don't read the TOS or the App service requirement, just clicks "accept" and that's it) that actually uploads usage patterns and connects to BBM (very odd for a calculator app). The moment some permissions were disabled, voila CPU usage for PIM dropped from 50% to 25%. That's a lot of processing power, mind you.

So if you found an offending app, please do feel free to talk about it. However, your mileage may vary, and your experience may be different than others. I urge caution when you tinker with permissions as the app may not work properly with certain permissions disabled.

Have fun!