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Advanced Task Killer?? Yay or Nay??

Jarpee said:
Most of the time atk shows more apps running than the "running services" in the settings. Why is this?
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Can you give some specific examples? I would imagine they are system tasks, or sub-tasks for listed services. ( IE: Contacts might need more than 1 task to operate. Android would just list "Contacts" and closing that would kill all sub-tasks, while ATK would list all of the seperate tasks. ) As for System Tasks, Android knows you shouldn't force them to close so it hides them, but ATK wants to list absolutely everything.
 
I use OS Monitor and sort the listing by CPU % to see if there are any apps running that are taking up large amounts of CPU. There usually aren't but every now and then some app, seismic most recently, must have gone ape and was taking up 30% constantly. So I killed that and my phone went back to normal snappiness. Android was not going to kill seismic by it self and had I not had a processes viewer like that I wouldn't have known what was slowing my phone down. In this type of case an app killer is essential, however, ATK in particular I don't find very useful because it doesn't show CPU % and it actually takes up a good deal of CPU it self, probably due to its advertisements. If an app is running in BG but not taking up CPU% I don't kill it, even if I'm not using it anymore, I think killing apps just cause they are idle can cause problems in the OS.
 
Ruben said:
On my eris I had to have one, the Incredible doesn't really need one.
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this is how I feel. on my Eris I could do a better job managing it's memory myself using ATK because it lagged when switching apps regardless of what you say. couldn't even keep up with me typing really either.

on the Incredible now though I never bothered to install ATK. I'd only ever use it if for some reason an app went haywire and did something it wasn't supposed to. LOVE the Incredible.
 
Waste of time. Took me a while to get over not using one on my moto droid, but I finally did and realized quickly that it was unneeded. This is android and it is extremely good at managing memory.

THIS IS NOT WINMO FOLKS.
 
I had it on my Inc. It screwed everything up. As soon as I uninstalled it, everything was working perfectly again. Maybe it is just me, but I will never put another one on a phone again. It just doesn't make sense to me that a phone would be created with the need to have one. My battery life has not changed without it.
 
Only time I see ATK make a real difference is when I first start the phone and a bunch of crap i never use starts. (FM Radio, Footprints, etc). Unless someone knows of a free way to stop these from starting up, I use ATK to kill them when I turn on the phone. Battery drops that initial 10% a lot slower without them running.

Test
kill at on/start - 100 -> 93 in about 1 - 1.5 hrs
Leave running - 100 -> 93 in 20 mins.
 
Once I realized how much cpu% having ATK running was using I stopped it. I still have the widget button to kill apps (including ATK itself) for those times when I know I have a million apps open, but no constantly running ATK. I think it's helping in ram dept to not have ATK running, but as far as battery.... not much difference.
 
Trust me when I say Google has far more expertise, far more resources, and far more engineering talent to address what is essentially a classic computer science problem than some indie engineer hoping to making a dollar off of your neurosis.

Leave the Android OS alone so it can do it's job.
 
I've read many of the threads here and on Android Central about battery life and the need/non-need for ATK-like apps. Here's what I observed directly:

Monday of this week, I was stuck in a room where I get zero VZW signal at the hospital where I work. I turn off my mobile network connection and turned on my wifi radio to stay connected to email, etc. My battery dwindled from 100% to about 25% in roughly 4 hours as I checked email, looked at facebook and did a bit of surfing. Not intensive, but just occasional use.

Tuesday morning, I installed ATK and let it run with its default options. Went back to the same room, did the same thing with the same radios on my phone, used it the same throughout the day. My battery was still at 70% 11 hours later. I didn't hit 50% until 10pm that night.

ATK seemed to make a HUGE difference in my usage. Will keep monitoring it though.
 
I only use it to kill apps that I am no longer using, pretty much when I get done using them. And that includes killing ATK whenever I use it to kill other apps. Never had battery problems or any kind of app problem.
 
I removed ATK from my phone last night. No other changes that I can think of. My battery life is more than twice what it usually runs for this time of day and I have been using the hell out of the phone today (downloading music, surfing, checking e-mail, voice messages, showing off the phone to coworkers). Usually my phone would be at 20% or less battery power, but I'm at 40% now. I think ATK is a huge battery hog.
 
I just did a little experiment with ATK. Without it running my phone had about 40mb of ram available, at which time I opened a program called "shopsavy". It took 3.5 seconds to open. After wards I killed everything (with the exception of my "ignored" apps) and then opened shopsavy again. It opened in about 1.5 seconds. Obviously killing these apps has some desired affects on the overall speed of the phone.


I have noticed similar speed increases on dialing phone numbers and opening other 3rd party apps as well. Opinions?
 
I'm running advanced task manager and it's working great. I don't have it set up to automatically kill tasks, I exclude the ones I want running and hit the end all button a couple times a day and after a startup.
 
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