BlackBerry Messenger stress test 2 update...

If you added me before and it's pending, please delete it. 

* pin and barcode now removed... contacts pretty much full *

* Update 3: Backing up contacts went easy peasy this time around. Calling it quits on the BBM test for now... look for the final "aftermath" post later this week. *

* Update 2: Things have come back to life and I filled up the contacts. I did a broadcast message. The device locked up for five minutes (I guess while sending the data out to every contact??) and then it came back to live so I could use it again... though when I opened up BBM again everything was blank. Doing a battery pull then we'll test the contacts backup *

* Update: Man, I think this device might be toast now. In re-posting my pin and getting a quick flood of contacts, the device is locking up. I've had to do three battery pulls in a row. Not sure what's going on but it's not liking something. I've pulled my pin and barcode. Going to give it some time without being bombarded by BBM requests to see if it comes back to life. *

Finally.. an update to our BlackBerry Messenger Stress Test 2 that I started back on May 26th on my BlackBery Bold 9650! I've been slacking on posting an updating because... well... while things started out smooth, they then took a frustrating turn for the worse. I posted my device pin here to blogs and as somewhat expected, got flooded with requests. BlackBerry Messenger 5.0 caps out at around ~2000 contacts, so I maxed that out fairly quick. [side note:  If you added me as a contact and are still pending, please just delete me and don't take offense - I'd love to approve you, but unfortunately I'm still waiting for RIM to make me a CrackBerry Kevin version of BBM that has an "approve all pending requests" option and can take 10,000+ contacts before it caps out. ] The good news was/is that when I reached the maximum capacity of allowed contacts, the device itself was still running fine. With my BlackBerry Bold 9000, the device was completely unusable with so many contacts added - constant hourglassing and the device slowed to a crawl due to lack of memory. However, right after I posted an update to the original blog post saying that the Bold 9650 seemed to be managing a full BBM list quite nicely (still running fast and smooth), my device spontaneously rebooted and went into an endless reboot cycle (flash read error). Bricked. 

I reloaded the OS, but unfortunately I lost all of the 2000 contacts I had approved plus the thousands of pending requests I was unable to approve due to hitting BBM capacity. The device crashed literally just a minute before I was about to back up my contacts. So basically I had to start the test over. I'm now back up to over 1500 contacts just from requests that continued to come in over the past week. So now I need a few hundred more contacts to hit the max number of contacts again (I'll pull my barcode/pin once I hit the max just so people don't keep trying to add me and I'm unable to approve them). Once I max out, I'll test out the remote and local backup, try broadcasting message and also see how battery life holds up with such a full BBM.

I have tons of video footage from the test, so once it's all done and the dust settles I'll cut it down to a ten minute video so you can get a good idead of what went down first hand. Thanks for participating in the experiment, thanks for the patience, and stay tuned!