Is task killer bad?

[venom21]

is it bad? i see some poeple seem against it sayin android OS does a find job of it by itself. but yet ill see things in the task list that i havent even opened always opening up.

i also feel like killing tasks seems to improve the battery life. lets hear some thoughts and reasoning for Using and NOT using a task killer. thanks.

 

[Piercing Heavens]

Use the Search function built into the message board. Many many many threads on this already.

 

[woop]

Not necessarily "bad." However, if you are not familiar with using one and don't really know what apps should not be killed, then you should avoid one all together.

 

[kayst]

There are apps that don't play nice and keep on running after you've stopped using them. In my opinion, killing running processes to free up memory is unnecessary, but if you have an app that just won't stop using up cpu cycles, then you need to kill it.

If you've downloaded Astro File Manager, it has a process manager (menu/tools) that will show you a constantly updating list of all the processes and %cpu usage. You can watch an app that you've quit to see if it is cycling. I'm watching Android System right now and see it go from 0 to 1 to 8 and back to 0. I had an app I downloaded that ran constantly and used up a lot of cpu cycles even after I had quit and this utility let me find it and force close. I decided to uninstall that one so it wouldn't happen again.

In short, I don't think you need to use a task manager to do any automatic stuff, just keep watch on new apps you download to see if they're going to play nice, and if they don't, decide if you want to keep them or not. That's how I'm going to approach it anyway.

 

[woop]

Yup, do not enable anything that kills apps automatically. The OS will take care of that as it knows what should be running and what shouldn't. If you do autokill things, it can negatively affect the normal functions of the phone. IMO, just an app that will monitor CPU usage is fine. Let the OS decide if it needs to close an app or not, and just keep an eye on the CPU usage. Anything that seems abnormal will pop out like a sore thumb, thats when you can kill that specific app.

 

[Rubik76]

While a previous poster was right that there are about a billion threads on this subject, it's jsut really hard not to weigh in.

I used a task killer forever on my Eris. I laughed at people who said they weren't necessary. Then I upgraded from 1.5 to 2.1. I have NEVER needed a task killer in 2.1. Yeah, some apps stay open longer than necessary. Android OS deals with them when it needs to. As a user, you almost never know better than the OS whether something shoud be killed or not.

 

[Mr.Slave]

The way that the built in task killer works is great the problem is that the thresh hold is to low as to when it finally kills an app to free memory. The ideal way to run a task killer is to change the thresh hold at witch android starts killing apps but that can only be achieved with root access. So I would hold off until you can do it right because if you think battery time is bad now wait till you have an app/widget running full time monitoring app that are running in the background. It is worse than a battery monitor widget.