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Task Killers - The good, the bad and the ugly

i personally suggest advanced task manager...only cause its like three apps in one (task killer, app uninstaller and tells me my available memory).
but like most apps, i start with looking at the settings. then fine tune it.
also, here is a random one, i remember with winmo...it was touch flo 3d but it was made by htc just like sense and yeah...it slowed the phone up!
 
Josh0187 said:
Download Spare Parts, will tell you what's hogging CPU battery and ram.
Click to expand...

I did and so far it's not been extremely helpful with me. I look at what has used the CPU and it seems that nothing has used it more than the system itself, but that is still a small amount. It doesn't add up to a bogged down phone. Maybe I just don't know how to use Spare Parts properly.
 
Josh0187 said:
Click on a link (so it starts loading) then click on the home link. Wait a couple minutes and click on the browser, you will notice the page has not loaded and it hasn't moved.

At least on the Droid if its minimized its not using CPU power.
Click to expand...


Josh0187 said:
Also download task manager and minimize the browser and watch the CPU % you will see browser staying at 0% while taskmanager may ramp from time to time from 5 - 15%

And Spare Parts can tell you how long things are in wake lock (keeping the phone from going to sleep) and how much CPU time said program is using. On average my browser using a total of 2-3 mins out of hours of use time using system CPU time (sleep mode browser activation)

If the website your on doesnt auto refresh, your not going to use extra CPU and ram.

Oh yes and the total time the browser is in wake lock (active while screen is off?) 9s so far with well over an hour of browsing.
Click to expand...

Ok, I see what you are saying about CPU.

After playing around last night and this morning I do notice that some sites will actually let the browser close pretty quickly when using the home button and some will keep it open for a good while. Sites that are loaded with flash content seem to try and stick around for a while longer than just plain sites, like the google homepage. Since I am usually surfing blogs and forums on my phone that may be where the problem is. It is also the reason that going back to the homepage and hitting the back button only leaves the browser running for a couple of minutes while just hitting home on a site like nhl.com or the hockey news will leave it running for over 10 to 15 minutes.
 
alprazolam said:
I did and so far it's not been extremely helpful with me. I look at what has used the CPU and it seems that nothing has used it more than the system itself, but that is still a small amount. It doesn't add up to a bogged down phone. Maybe I just don't know how to use Spare Parts properly.
Click to expand...

Sadly Spare Parts only looks for CPU and battery drain, so if the memory is all used then it wont show that. However task managers should show you how much is being used...
 
Josh0187 said:
Click on a link (so it starts loading) then click on the home link. Wait a couple minutes and click on the browser, you will notice the page has not loaded and it hasn't moved.
Click to expand...

On my Eris, the page does load in the background if you tap Home after clicking a link.

This is how I browse websites while I'm at work :P

I'll click the link, hit the End key to lock the phone and toss it into my pocket. By the time I get a chance to check my phone again, the page is loaded.

(ironically, I picked up this habit from my iPhone, that's how Safari works on it)

I've gotten rid of ATK, and I never use the back button to exit the HTC browser, only hitting home, and haven't noticed more (or less) lag than before.

The only real, predictable lag I get is when the phone is searching for/switching to Wi-Fi. Annoying if I'm in the middle of responding to a text, but oh well.
 
Just uninstalled my task killer, and I already feel the freedom of not checking every 30 sec! I am a moderate user, checking FB/Twitter Mobile constantly, and running Pandora for a couple hours a night, and I get right around 24 hours no problem, if not more using my music files over Pandora.

On a side note, I have learned a lot on this forum, thanks mostly in part to OfTheDamned and Caddyman. Keep up the awesome work.
 
I uninstalled ATK a few days ago, and immediately I felt like it was a waste because it felt like the phone actually got a bit faster. This morning, I installed it again to find tons of apps open in the background that were the reason my phone had slowed down to a crawl shortly after uninstalling ATK.

I'm not gonna give suggestions, but ATK is back on my phone, and I'm less frustrated with it. I have a problem with hitting "back" to get out of programs, so ATK takes care of it for me every so often.

Spare Parts, or whatever that program was called, did absolutely nothing for me, which is why it was gone less than 24 hours after it was installed. The CPU monitoring is useless (what the hell is that, a live bar? Who cares how long Messages has been open and used, my phone tells me overall what keeps it awake), the screen transition thingy was nice for the first few minutes, then it was blatant (in a weird way) and I felt I was being duped into thinking it was faster when they just used the animation to make it look faster. Could be me, but I thought it did nothing.

So I have my ATK back on and I couldn't be happier. I guess everyone's different, as if their phones. Some people have the lag, some don't, and some manage their battery well, and other just suck. See what fits you best.
 
I probably sit somewhere in the middle of the task manager debate. I took time to research how the android os handles tasks and found that for most things it does a good job as long as the apps you are running listen to the android system events and are prepared in a mobile friendly way. Unfortunately, Not everything in the market is friendly.

so after getting frustrated with the current task management apps I decided to write my own and open source it.

you can find it at my blog at:
Vine Ripe Software Blog

there is no way it can do harm to you're system and you can look at the source yourself.

these days I trend to just use my phone and when I notice lag I check my app and kill off anything not used admire and that usually makes my phone snappy again.

that said I have noticed that there is a memory leak in one of the main system processes. it is bad enough that I need to reboot once a week. Usually when my app is reading memory of less then 40 mb with all user apps killed.

the android system, for me, does an ok job of keeping the system functioning it is just from time to time I need to give it a kick or a reboot.
at least that is what I find
 
I unInstalled atk after reading all the info and felt eris was more sluggish and battery use was worse.Then I tried taskiller and found battery use even worse. Went on to test task manager and found it to work as advertised and keep battery use down. The automatic app kill is great. It doesn't list the native mail app so it stopped syncing mail but found what process it's called and excluded out from the auto kill.The phones ben running great ever since. After being a loyal atk then taskiller user, I'm did on task manager.
 
Update:

It's now been more than a week since i've removed my task killer. I'm consistently getting 2+ days from a single charge. Before I would be lucky to get 15 hours. Part of the solution is that I don't constantly check to see what is running and get the urge to kill it. Also, the auto kill would continuously be working - as we should all know by now, the android system automatically launches certain programs. Auto kill will close them, only to have the system reopen them. You can see the problem here. That used power too. I guess if you download certain apps, a task killer may be necessary, but so far, I'm good without one.

Also, I really like Spare Parts. Not so much to check CPU usage, but to speed up the transition between windows. I find this to be a great feature!
 
mine is lagging a lot at the moment. not sure why. i was using ATK and took it off last week to see if it would help. so it's been about a week. not sure i see a difference either way. except of course that my phone is lagging right now. but it would do that once in a while before.

update - seems to not be lagging so much right now. maybe it was lagging after waking it up after a night's sleep. who the heck knows anymore :-)
 
I've been pretty good about resetting my phone every 3 days and clearing cache about once a week. I've had no lag. It's like a new phone. Before doing these two things, I would feel like throwing my Eris across the room at times.
 
What I've noticed is some things will restart no matter how many times you kill them. While these items for the most part will not harm you battery, I'm sure they each use a section of memory.

In general, anything that is open will use a section of your phones memory. As you use you phone and open more items, you phones memory will continue to decrease. This is where the lag starts to happen. If you check your available memory as you use your phone you'll see it. I think the android OS allows the memory to drop to a point that is too low before it decides to free up more memory. The droid with a faster processor will compensate for this. The Eris, with a slower processor cannot.

Processes that run in the background that are essential to the OS we shouldn't be concerned about. It's all the widgets/apps that continue to sit in memory that are the problem. I don't understand the logic behind this. Restarting your phone will solve the problem, temporarily and you'll notice an increase in speed. But why are apps written without an exit option? Also, most of us are obsessed with this, constantly checking, adding task killers, etc. Here is where some of your battery drain comes into play.

Now some items are poorly written and will prevent your phone from sleeping, causing battery decline. I'm not really talking about that aspect.

I guess that's something we'll have to deal with if we want to use phones with the android OS. I've never seen anything like it before using the Eris. The debate will go on and on. For now I've decided the best route for me is to not use a TK, be especially careful of apps/widgets I use and restart my phone daily.
 
Bswartz95 said:
I've been pretty good about resetting my phone every 3 days and clearing cache about once a week. I've had no lag. It's like a new phone. Before doing these two things, I would feel like throwing my Eris across the room at times.
Click to expand...

What exactly do you mean by "resetting", and where do I go to clear the cache?

Tx,
Pegleg
 
Pegleg said:
What exactly do you mean by "resetting", and where do I go to clear the cache?

Tx,
Pegleg
Click to expand...

I believe he is talking about restarting the phone when he says resetting. If you read the latter part of my first post in this thread it explains clearing the cache.
 
Android handles memory management just fine on its own; no task killer is ever, ever needed. If the system needs memory, it takes it from idling programs. If not, it doesn't. That's how it works.
 
I use one called Automatic Task Killer and it lets check off which apps you always want to killed, like for the stock visual VM and messages apps, and anything I don't ever use.
 
deman89 said:
I use one called Automatic Task Killer and it lets check off which apps you always want to killed, like for the stock visual VM and messages apps, and anything I don't ever use.
Click to expand...

Be careful with that one. Some of the apps you chose to kill can be tied in with processes that need to be running. Plus it is known to kill batteries as well as apps.
 
I can say that I generally let the device handle the apps and memory usage on its own. There are some occasions where I force close background apps due to sluggish behavior of the device, game, etc. In those cases, I do see improvement in performance. However, it is likely due to a poorly designed application that is using cycles when it shouldn't.
 
wanted to make a quick post here about setting up a task killer. i am not 100% sure about how this equate to "Advanced Task Killer", but I use "Advanced Task Manager" and i suggest the first time you install it your do this.

When i open a few apps and go to ATM's app interface it shows on the main screen those apps running. I can choose to exclude any app I want from the "1 touch kill" widget.

It is vitally important that you set that widget up right, here is why and how.

WHY! because lets say you have twidroid, browser, and email running, you install ATM and exclude those and think you are all set. Later that day you are using handcent, sending some text, etc. Phone gets laggy and you hit your 1 touch kill widget.

handcent wasn't running when you set up ATM's kill list, you just KILLED HANDCENT! YOU DUMMY! Now you won't get notification for your text and you will come here and make a thread about how handcent is broke, and your phone is a POS, and all that....don't do it.

HOW! Once you install ATM (or ATK) open every single stinking app you have, if you have like 50 open 25 and repeat with the other 25. The object here is that you want to MAKE SURE that any vital app that gives notifications DOES NOT get killed in a unexpected manner.

Things I would exclude always.

sms app w/notifications
mail app w/notifications
soc. network apps w/notifications
any home replacements if you use one
lockscreen app if you use them

Just wanted to drop this here so you guys don't go killin apps you shouldn't
 
Caddyman said:
wanted to make a quick post here about setting up a task killer. i am not 100% sure about how this equate to "Advanced Task Killer", but I use "Advanced Task Manager" and i suggest the first time you install it your do this.
.............
Click to expand...

excellent post.
 
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