Help What app is not responding?

[tarverator]

I have a Samsung Google Nexus S with Android 2.3.6. About every other or every third time it wakes from sleep, it goes all sluggish and unresponsive for about five seconds, then vibrates, and only then finally wakes up fully. Extremely annoying, especially when the UI isn't even responsive enough to trace the lock pattern!

I have figured out from reading the System Log (with the System Tuner app -- my phone is rooted) that some application is not responding and Android gives it 5 seconds, and then makes everything loaded dump a stack trace. Every time this happens, there are always a bunch of log entries which invariably contain these lines:

[HIGH]Wrote stack traces to '/data/anr/traces.txt'
threadid=4: reacting to signal 3[/HIGH]

I can read that file, but I don't understand it. How can I figure out which app is causing the problem, so (hopefully!) I can get rid of that app?

Thanks!

 

[nickdalzell]

what version of Android are you using? if you have at least version 4.0 or 4.1, there should be a dialog telling you something like '[app name] is not responding, do you want to close it? [wait] [ok]'

older versions such as 2.3 and under you just have to look under settings, applications, running services and look for any app using a large chunk of RAM, one time i had a rogue app using 280MB!! (ended up being a lock screen app)

 

[tarverator]

I am using Android 2.3.6, as indicated in my original post. This does sometimes ask about force-closing wayward apps but only foreground ones. My problem, evidently, is happening in the background and the essence of my question is how to isolate and solve this problem.

An app using lots of RAM has only a coincidental relationship to it's failing to respond (going "ANR" which I have learned stands for "Application Not Responding") and killing device responsiveness for a period of time.