• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

SystemPanel: a task killer for people who hate task killers.

1.0.11 is out now in both full and Lite versions. All the updates made in this version are also included in the Lite (free and without ads) version.

The most notable new feature in this release is the ability to see processor utilization independently for each core of a dual core phone. This feature is available in the "Live Metrics" screen:

Multicore.png


The plot for the second core will often be grayed-out if that core is offline. If you want to see both cores in action, you can typically wake it up by rapidly scrolling the screen up and down to cause the device to a lot of graphics rendering work. Single-core phones will still show a single chart as before.

Also added in this release is the ability to see storage usage information for devices that have both internal user storage and an external SD card. Regrettably there is no specification for retrieving this information in the Android API, so we have incorporated manufacturer-specific tests to determine if such storage is present.

PLEASE let us know if you have a dual storage phone and are not seeing information on both storage locations.

Additionally the "Device Info" screen's "Storage" display has been updated to show all mounted devices on your phone/tablet.
 
MrAiko said:
Hey tliebeck, i've a question. What does it do upon exclude? I don't understand. Can you explain? Thanks (:
Click to expand...

If you want to kill all of your apps but not some apps, you will have those in your exclude list.

Note: please don't kill all :<
 
Hi Everyone!

1.1.0 is out (both Lite and Paid). This release rearranges the process listing a bit by dividing applications into four categories: Active, Service-Only, Inactive, and Internal/System.

  • Active applications are actually running at the present time on the device. An active application
    may be running in the background and not have any information currently displayed on the screen. Any active application has
    at least one "Activity", i.e., screen of its user interface, loaded into memory.
  • Service-Only applications are running applications that have no user-interface components (no "Activities")
    loaded. Some applications in this category simply do not have a user interface of any kind. Other applications in this
    category may not have any visual user interface components loaded into memory at the present time (such an application
    may move back and forth between being "Active" and "Service-Only").
  • Inactive (Cached) applications have been preloaded into memory, but are not actually using up any
    system resources. Such applications will not consume any battery power whatsoever. The memory used by these
    applications can be immediately reclaimed should other applications require it. As such, there is no need to
    manually remove these applications, as you will see no tangible benefit from doing so. As you terminate applications,
    the Android OS will attempt to cache other (or perhaps the same) applications into memory again.
  • Internal applications are those which are part of the Android operating system itself.
    Some of these applications may be terminated manually, but they will be immediately restarted afterward by the OS.

Another significant new feature is an improvement to the "End Task" button. As you may already be aware, as of Froyo (Android 2.2), Android will not let users terminate certain applications that have running services or pending alarms. Froyo instead requires that you use the the built-in Settings control panel to do this (which can be fairly painful to navigate to). Starting in 1.1.0, if you press "End Task" in SystemPanel on a specific process and it is determined that the process has not exited, SystemPanel will raise a dialog providing direct access to the Android "control panel" for that application. You can then press "Force Stop" to terminate the app. If you want to try this out, try having SystemPanel (or SystemPanel Lite) terminate itself (apps are also not allowed to terminate themselves in Froyo and later). Please note this feature is only available in Eclair (2.1) and later versions of Android. 1.5/1.6 don't support it, but they don't particularly need it either.
 
tliebeck,

I have a question for you. I've been using System App for a while now, but i guess i don't understand some of it.
I think the new ROM i'm trying out is causing some problems and i want to make sure.

My main confusion is that sometimes, while i have my phone on charge, the battery is draining.
When i look at Top Apps in the 8 hour or 2 hour screen, the culprit seems to be System, which ranges anywhere from 5% to 9.8%. So even though I have not been using the device...something is.

What exactly does System entail? is it all the background/google syncing? or wifi on? or...?

Any help you can give me would be really appreciated.

Thank you,
 
riskaa said:
tliebeck,

I have a question for you. I've been using System App for a while now, but i guess i don't understand some of it.
I think the new ROM i'm trying out is causing some problems and i want to make sure.

My main confusion is that sometimes, while i have my phone on charge, the battery is draining.
When i look at Top Apps in the 8 hour or 2 hour screen, the culprit seems to be System, which ranges anywhere from 5% to 9.8%. So even though I have not been using the device...something is.

What exactly does System entail? is it all the background/google syncing? or wifi on? or...?

Any help you can give me would be really appreciated.

Thank you,
Click to expand...

Sorry for not seeing this. "System" is the Android "system_server" process, basically the root process of the Android system. More info can be found here: Understanding the Android System Server

I've heard of certain firmwares not charging over USB (e.g. apparently the ICS build I'm about to try for my Droid3 has this, albeit it's alpha). Does the phone indicate it is charging in SystemPanel?

The "system processes" item on the other hand is the collection of non-Android Linux processes.
 
Hello all,

1.1.1 is out, this is a maintenance release that fixes some UI artifacts found on phones with 320 DPI displays (e.g. Galaxy Nexus and HTC Rezound). It also corrects an issue with the HTC Rezound (and likely other modern HTC devices) where the CPU frequency (MHz) plot did not display.

Best
--Tod
 
I used SystemPanel since its beta on my Moto Droid. Great app. My only gripe though, is that it still can't kill itself. If you made that possible, I'd gladly pay for the full version.
 
I am having problems with my SystemPanel program. If it helps, I have the paid version since I use it ever so often to monitor processes so that I can determine if I have one misbehaving.

Well recently the "Play Market" said there was an upgrade for SystemPanel. When I tried to upgrade, I got a message like "Incorrect Package found" or something like that (my phone is locked up while I am at work so I cannot give you the exact message here). So I thought I may have a corrupt file in SystemPanel so I uninstalled it and tried to reinstall it from the "Play Market". I got the same message and now I have no working SystemPanel.

Finally I went to my backups and tried to install them. I got the message "App was not installed" after it goes through all the signs as if it is installing.

Is there a corrupt file, directory, or flag that I need to delete so that I can reinstall SystemPanel? I wrote the app creators several days ago (yes, with the exact error message *smile*) but they have yet to reply. Any help from you SystemPanel masters would be appreciated. I do like this app.
 
I've used System Panel Lite for years with no problems. The developer is usually quick to respond to questions but I know he's been putting a lot of time & effort into the excellent FX File Explorer lately. Try contacting him again. He might just be busy, but it's possible he never got your 1st message.
 
tliebeck said:
(scroll down for screenshots)

A word of warning....SystemPanel does NOT offer a capability to automatically kill tasks in order to "save battery life". I disagree with the idea that such a thing would offer an improvement. The Android OS does a fine job of this all by itself, and such a capability would only be helpful if an app were suffering from a bug (or poorly written), such that is consumed battery unnecssarily in a semi-dormant state.
Click to expand...

I respectfully disagree. I'm using the Task Manager included in Maverick ROM 4.5 on my D3 to auto-kill multiple applications. Applications like Maps, Qik, Facebook, Opera, etc. are being auto-killed 2 minutes after the screen times out. Doing so increased the battery life of my phone dramatically.
 
I respectfully disagree. tliebeck is absolutely 100% correct. Use of any type of task killer is not only poor practice, it's actually counter-productive. Killing cached apps wastes power and does not increase performance. This has been well documented in many places including by Google engineers.

Android does an excellent job of managing processes and memory with no help at all.
 
Crashdamage said:
I've used System Panel Lite for years with no problems. The developer is usually quick to respond to questions but I know he's been putting a lot of time & effort into the excellent FX File Explorer lately. Try contacting him again. He might just be busy, but it's possible he never got your 1st message.
Click to expand...

Crashdamage,

I was the same. I have used SystemPanel (paid edition) for years without problems. Fantastic program.

I will try contacting him again. The email that I used was android@nextapp.com. Is that a good email to use or do you have another where he has responded quickly?

Thanks again for responding.
 
Just saw the updates to this thread (I can never seem to stay subscribed to threads). Have been in contact with poster. android@nextapp.com is the correct address.

And while I'm here, has anyone had trouble upgrading to the latest SystemPanel (1.1.1 / rev 241)?
 
tliebeck,
i've updated to the latest System Panel, but it seems not to work consistently on ICS or JellyBean. For some reason, the app shuts down and reloads sporadically. I haven't seen anyone else post about this problem, but I wonder if anyone is experiencing the same thing?
Thanks.
 
tliebeck said:
Just saw the updates to this thread (I can never seem to stay subscribed to threads). Have been in contact with poster. android@nextapp.com is the correct address.

And while I'm here, has anyone had trouble upgrading to the latest SystemPanel (1.1.1 / rev 241)?
Click to expand...

Yes, Tliebeck has been trying to help me. Unfortunately we could not get the app to work. However, I do appreciate the developer taking the time to respond and help me. I know how busy they are.
 
New update available: 1.2.0.

It's mainly user interface and aesthetic improvements. It's now compatible with Samsung's "Multi Window" feature, which as a dev I'm beginning to find quite useful. The Installer feature now shows system apps as well (if desired).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom