Related
When I got my desire it was stable and fast the more I put on it the slower it gets . I've tried numerous task killers and some of them screw the phone up . On one thread someone suggested leaving the phone to manage its own background programs . What does everyone thing is it better with no task manager ?
-------------------------------------
Sent via the XDA Tapatalk App
My personal choice is to leave taskiller off the desire. I put a taskiller on and almost immedietly the phone started acting wierd eventually getting into some sort of loop rebooting itself. After many reboots it eventually gave me enough time to uninstall the taskiller. Obviously that was the problem as it has never repeated itself since. My phone runs fine without it.
I really cannot understand why people use task killers. As I have said before if you are a real expert and you have a badly behaved program that you have to use you might just have to use of a task killer.
If you are not a real expert or are even asking the question don't use one. You will almost certainly end up with worse performance and decreased battery life.
I have 60 plus applications on my Desire and don't suffer any slowdowns or other problems. There is just no need for task killers/managers. This is NOT windows!
Android has a built in task killer. It's pretty good and IMHO difficult to improve on.
Kill Task Killers!!
Agree with others, you only need it to kill a rogue app without reset.
I have around 100 apps and the only semi-slowdown I can feel is by putting complex widgets and live wallpapers together. Otherwise I've tried some of these task killers and even killing all the 20-30 processes 'frozen' or active in the background had no effect.
Still I keep it in order to kill those badly designed applications that have some glitches in going back to the main screen or rarely get stuck.
I would think that if you experience some problems they are not related to the quantity of applications open in background, but rather by a single one that has some design flaw.
andycted said:
I have around 100 apps and the only semi-slowdown I can feel is by putting complex widgets and live wallpapers together. Otherwise I've tried some of these task killers and even killing all the 20-30 processes 'frozen' or active in the background had no effect.
Still I keep it in order to kill those badly designed applications that have some glitches in going back to the main screen or rarely get stuck.
I would think that if you experience some problems they are not related to the quantity of applications open in background, but rather by a single one that has some design flaw.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well said.
The trouble is people use a task killer when they don't have a problem. They just kill apps. without a clue what they are doing.
I repeat don't use a task killer until you really have too.
and what about battery life?is too many running apps affecting battery?
polystirenman said:
and what about battery life?is too many running apps affecting battery?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Doesn't affect battery at all. Almost all apps. are suspended in the background when you move away from them. Task killers are the major cause of poor battery performance as killed apps. then have to be reloaded instead of resumed. Try switching between say six applications, and using them, with and without task killing. I bet you will see a massive performance gain without the task killer.
polystirenman said:
and what about battery life?is too many running apps affecting battery?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If an application keeps going in the background in some way/service it's because it's meant to be, like an updating rss feed reader, a live wallpaper, an email client pulling mail from the server, widgets or music player streaming/playing music. If you don't want those to run in the background you obviously should set them not to update, remove them from the desktop, stop them manually, etc.
Otherwise every other application you open and then leave when you switch to another application, gets stopped and 'frozen' in the state it had so that when you switch back to it or reopen it, you find it in the same state, giving you the impression of having been running in the background (but it didn't).
It's a smart way to combine the speed of single-running applications in dumb iphones and the flexibility of more complex os like WinMo. It's also apparently the same way as WP7 will work.
Like mentioned above by killing processes you mostly cause disruption in the pre-ordered way they work and probably cause more battery usage since they have to restart from scratch for the most part. More importantly real-time monitoring of processes and auto-killing them is most likely eating battery a lot since every real time monitoring does that, like many real time battery widgets and such.
Ok.thx for answers guys.i am geting rid of task killer right now.
Same here .. I'm a techie on most things obviously not Android must try harder !
Must admit did complete hard reset yesterday got rid of task killer after first posts phone seems more stable
-------------------------------------
Sent via the XDA Tapatalk App
I have a task killer, but only for killing appliactions which aren't written good and causes some lag or they don't want to close..
I just looked at the comments on the Advanced Task Killer (free, high in the list in the Market).
I wanted to believe you guys here at XDA. But I went trough the comments on that ATK and 95% was 4 to 5 stars. All with reply's like:
"must have app"
"should be included in Android"
"doubled my battery life"
Now if SO many people say that, I can't imagine that they are all wrong. Why would they all lie?
I myself have been using that ATK for a while, killing only some things that don't close (like games,Facebook or Twitter, etc...)... battery life is still not as good as I would like it to be, but I only have had my Desire for a week.
Are you guys REALLY sure that stopping to use ATK will improve battery life?
XDA mark said:
I just looked at the comments on the Advanced Task Killer (free, high in the list in the Market).
I wanted to believe you guys here at XDA. But I went trough the comments on that ATK and 95% was 4 to 5 stars. All with reply's like:
"must have app"
"should be included in Android"
"doubled my battery life"
Now if SO many people say that, I can't imagine that they are all wrong. Why would they all lie?
I myself have been using that ATK for a while, killing only some things that don't close (like games,Facebook or Twitter, etc...)... battery life is still not as good as I would like it to be, but I only have had my Desire for a week.
Are you guys REALLY sure that stopping to use ATK will improve battery life?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Read this article:
http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/
it's the placebo effect. A While ago there was a thread on a winmo forum for a new overclocking application. It had tons of "amazing", "must have", "goes way faster", comments, it became incredibly popular. then the developer made public the fact that it was a social experiment and the application did absolutely nothing other than having a nice interface for reporting fake cpu .
As said if you have a single bad-behaving application (which is very rate) only kill or rather uninstall it. Games don't run in the background, battery becomes great after one-two weeks, but still you can't expect it to run for 10 hours of continuous heavy usage. Buy a second battery if you need that
XDA mark said:
Now if SO many people say that, I can't imagine that they are all wrong. Why would they all lie?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No one is saying they are lying - personally I see it more as a placebo effect, but I do understand there are certain situations where task killers come into there own. Having owned 3 Android phones though, I can say that in my case leaving Android to do its own thing works very well for me - I don't believe that it actually increases battery life significantly, but I do firmly believe it improves the overall stability of the platform.
One thing that probably should be added, is that using swap on an Android device will cause problems with Androids own internal resource management because it cannot distinguish between real memory and the virtual memory made available using swap. See here for more details. I wouldn't be at all surprised if those people who get the most "benefit" from task killers are also using swap.
Regards,
Dave
Ok, so there are task killer threads that lead me to believe that they a are a waste of time by and large, and that android automatically sorts things out. Those same posts also point out that task killers are an extra drain on the battery having to start applications over again uses more battery than leaving something dormant in the background. These posts are not the thoughts of one person but unanimous to those threads. All very well, but then there are the battery saving threads that say to close down all applications that aren't being used to save additional battery??? Again this is the view of everyone in those particular threads, so is there any chance of getting the two camps to FIGHT! And then I can decide which I shall choose to do!
For info I currently have task killer and use it all the time and get a full days use out of my battery which is good because I cane the hell out of it! But If I could improve it that would be good. I have however this afternoon decided to not use task killer for a few days and see how I get on. But an explanation would be good from both sides.
I never use a task killer and get 2 or 3 days use out of of my Desire. No point in a war just use your Desire for a week without a task killer and then a week with. I am pretty sure you will just find the task killer slows things down and doesn't improve battery life. You will not find any of the ROM chefs using a task killer either!
HI
I was reading one of those posts this morning and decided to uninstall task-killer.I have to say that after half day of heavy use my device started to be so laggy it took contacts or calendar 5 seconds to open!then I checked running processes and pretty much everything I was playing with was still running.memory dropped to 10MB and device became unusable.cannot say battery use has improved.I think it was the same.
But my task-killer is back up and running.
I must say that I am new to Android.I was using WM for long time.I can cook my own ROMs so I am not a noob but I know very little about Android.so if anyone knows what could be the reason of this huge slowdown I will be grateful for explanation.
And one more thing that needs to be said...
My device is rooted and I am using a2sd too.
polystirenman said:
HI
I was reading one of those posts this morning and decided to uninstall task-killer.I have to say that after half day of heavy use my device started to be so laggy it took contacts or calendar 5 seconds to open!then I checked running processes and pretty much everything I was playing with was still running.memory dropped to 10MB and device became unusable.cannot say battery use has improved.I think it was the same.
But my task-killer is back up and running.
I must say that I am new to Android.I was using WM for long time.I can cook my own ROMs so I am not a noob but I know very little about Android.so if anyone knows what could be the reason of this huge slowdown I will be grateful for explanation.
And one more thing that needs to be said...
My device is rooted and I am using a2sd too.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You may like to read this:
http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/
dhiral.v said:
You may like to read this:
http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
well.i did read that before.that is why i do not understand why my phone was so slow.they are claiming that android should close apps by itself to reclaim memory.but in my case that wasn't true.everything was running and nothing was getting closed by system.
Here's another good read:
Google and Cyanogen comments imply task killer/manager apps are pointless
Both Dianne Hackborn and Cyanogen say Task Killers are useless, even developers of these apps concur. You should listen to them, I guess they understand juuust a little bit more than we do what Android is about.
pascanu said:
Here's another good read:
Google and Cyanogen comments imply task killer/manager apps are pointless
Both Dianne Hackborn and Cyanogen say Task Killers are useless, even developers of these apps concur. You should listen to them, I guess they understand juuust a little bit more than we do what Android is about.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i would like to believe it.i was so excited when i saw a post saying that i should get rid of task-killer.but as i wrote before after half day of heavy use(my phone is new so i play with it a lot :-D ) without task killer my phone was soooooo slow i couldn't use it anymore.today i had task-killer back on the phone and all day no slowdown what so ever.i don't understand that.i am starting to think it is related to A2SD and memory being relocated to SD card.
I also agree that taskkiller (the way it works for WM) is not good for android, because android has a better memory management...
but there is another flavour of taskkiller in the market... which are based on this:
How to configure Android's *internal* taskkiller
Unfortunately, your phone needs to be rooted before you can use that method.
If you worry about memory remember that the worst kind of memory is...free memory ! Because it's not being used. Obviously ram gets reclaimed and freed when it's needed.
As said in a couple more redundant threads, there might be a rogue app which you are better off closing because it stays in the background wrongly eating cpu cycles, but this is very very rare. Otherwise I think it's just the usual placebo effect...
andycted said:
If you worry about memory remember that the worst kind of memory is...free memory ! Because it's not being used. Obviously ram gets reclaimed and freed when it's needed.
As said in a couple more redundant threads, there might be a rogue app which you are better off closing because it stays in the background wrongly eating cpu cycles, but this is very very rare. Otherwise I think it's just the usual placebo effect...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Have you read the link in my previous post?
ANOTHER thread about this... There must be plenty of threads on this now, but I'll just once more give my impression.
Personally I have had HTC widgets like NEWS or MAIL or CALENDER hang or crash on me and I could not restart them unless I restarted the phone. In this case an app killer was ESSENTIAL. I don't believe you need to leave the app killer running always and kill every single task when your done, but its essential to have one installed so if a widget hangs (as has happened quite a few times on the Desire) you can kill the hung app without having to try a 5 hour shut down(another desire issue) and battery removal.
Also... after 2 days use of many apps and camera use and internet and youtube app etc, your internal RAM will be about 50mb available to programs. yes, android is supposed to kill stuff as it needs, and Im sure it does, but 50mb free memory compared to 150mb the lag is VERY obvious. So I do tend to kill tasks like camera and youtube etc if I have not used them in a day and my phone seem slaggy. the phone definetly runs faster then. Thats just a fact. So the internal android task killer is not as efficent as you'd like to think. Android 2.2 runs 450% faster than 2.1 so maybe then no lag will EVER be noticable. I'll still keep a task killer installed though in case widgets crash or hang.
I found my battery most efficient with this setup:
- Installed Advanced Task killer (free)
- Security level: High (it doesn't show system apps)
- I have put all frequently using apps on ignore list: ATK, Messages, BatteryTimeLite, Internet, Weather, Clock, Calendar (so Android manage with those apps)
- Auto kill Level: Safe
- Auto kill Frequency: 2 hours
With that setup battery lasts almost half time longer than without TK or with killing all apps when screen goes off. Also I don't have any force closes / lag.
Never experienced lag at 100 or 20 mb free.
mcgon1979 said:
but 50mb free memory compared to 150mb the lag is VERY obvious.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The amount of free memory doesn't necessarily have anything to do with lag.
As Android does not use virtual memory (unless you've hacked in swapper, which is a bad idea anyway), it will attempt to make best use of available memory which may mean keeping recently used items in memory, and thus "consuming" free memory. However, if those items are not actively processing, they should not be consuming CPU cycles and therefore consuming little to no power.
As far as a running system is concerned, having lots of free memory just means that it is being underutilized.
I don't kill tasks and my phone never lags - that's just a fact too!
Regards,
Dave
boge said:
I also agree that taskkiller (the way it works for WM) is not good for android, because android has a better memory management...
but there is another flavour of taskkiller in the market... which are based on this:
How to configure Android's *internal* taskkiller
Unfortunately, your phone needs to be rooted before you can use that method.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Using this method it is possible to make the native task killer a bit more aggresive. I did some experiments with this on the HTC Hero and it just might have improved speed slightly but at the expense of stability.
"Normal" task killers are completely pointless but if people want to use them why not? It they want to sacrifice both battery life and performance by using one surely that is their choice. Whatever the experts says will not convince them.
I suppose you could use one to kill the very occasional hung app. i.e. Once every few days, but most people seem to use them constantly and totally indiscriminately.
1. About Cpu: get a task manager with cpu monitoring and verify for yourself, frozen applications in background don't do anything.
2. About memory: If an application needs 10 MB it just uses 10 MB and couldn't care less if there are 11, 100, 1000 MB free. The only moment you COULD see a tiny slowdown is the instant it needs 20 and there are only 10 available, but the system is quite good in managing that, and freeing resources (there are six levels of memory cleaning which progressively remove unused applications from the background)
3. If you stop monitoring memory usage, stop worrying about the system, you'll find out it manages itself perfectly and you enjoy the phone a lot more.
Interesting article about installed apps and a battery.
http://blog.gsmarena.com/android-handsets-batteries-should-last-for-more-than-a-day-google-says/
"...Page accused the installed apps of causing the problems and claimed that software running in the background exhausts the battery quickly...."
Interesting article about installed apps and a battery.
http://blog.gsmarena.com/android-handsets-batteries-should-last-for-more-than-a-day-google-says/
"...Page accused the installed apps of causing the problems and claimed that software running in the background exhausts the battery quickly...."
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
as said in the post above, get a cpu monitoring task manager and see for yourself if you have something wrong. Personally I don't have any.
Also watch battery history which tells you if the phone doesn't manage to go properly to sleep (partial wake)
regarding that article, iphone users get way less battery time and they don't even have multitasking...
-------------------------------------
Ipad's dont have "Spell Check" thery have "Replace" built into Safarii adn it wokrs just fineq!!!
I personally installed auto memory manager, an app that configures android's internal task killer. Its not a task manager by itself, uses android's task manager. You can set the limits in MB for all the app categories android has.
I was using it in my hero as well and found it really useful. Before having it installed, after some time my free memory was ~50mb, thus my phone was sometimes lagging. Now its always above 100mb and no lag at all
Ive read plenty of articles/topics/post that said Task killers are pointless on android but I still see people defending that argument saying that they are in fact needed.
I want to know is it necessary for a device like the Evo that has alot more RAM to keep applications open in the background, a track record of bad battery life, and an abundance of applications that appear automatically in the background when we power on our devices (I just rebooted my devices and Advanced Task Killer says I have 20 applications open and I haven't opened anything) to have a task killer. What do you think?
Well first, when you boot it up, those applications automatically open up.
Task killers are a major part in my Android life baha.
IMO, it helps my phones performance in many factors (battery, speed,storage, ect.)
I would recommend one, suggestively Advanced Task Killer
i used task killers for maybe 3-4 months with the Nexus One; once people said that it's not needed, i stopped using it and haven't noticed my battery draining any faster
i agree, there are too many apps boot up automatically when you first power on the phone, but you can use apps like Autostarts to prevent these apps from starting on boot
Yeah, different people have different issues.
but, get something either a task killer or that app he suggested because that does so down the performance on the device.
Android manages memory on quite well on it's own. You using a task manager hinders it's ability to do it's job correctly.
You have to realize that we're the end user, the people that actually create this stuff, know what they're doing.
Linux has been around for a while.
A task killer will do NOTHING more than end apps that may/may not need to running and give you a FALSE sense of preformance.
I am a noob when it comes to android phones so anything will help! I have been told and pretty sure I read something about task killers being bad for your android phone??? Is this true? I currently use Advanced Task Manager free. Is this a good task manager? If not does anyone know of one thats better. I tried to search the forumn but was unable to find anything on this subject...I'm probably just searching wrong. Any knowledge will help!
Try searching the Q&A forum
Don't use task killers is the bottom line.
Use Google search to find out about google and task killers.
avoid them like the plague
Not. It's stepping on Androids toes. If you really need a kill an app (froze or its just using a lot of battery), you can do it in Android itself in Applications.
i noticed i acctually get more battery life with out a task killer, android will close out programs as it needs the memory any way so have had better performance with out it. the Sprint rep actually installed mine on my phone when i bought it so was suprised to learn all this at first but has long sense proven true
Been using Advanced Task Manager since I had my G1 and have not noticed any negative effects. The browser alone takes up a considerable amount of interal memory and does not close on exit. Task managers are good as long as you know how to use them and exclude system applications or user apps that you want to stay running like widgets and such. They may not improve battery life that much, but they help free up internal memory. However, if you're running a Froyo rom, they're pretty much useless until the app devs update the way they work. Froyo doesnt allow them to kill the app, just background data.
Here's some pretty clear literature on why you absolutely do not need them.
While I agree that a task killer is not needed it is not bad. I mean using one wont cause damage to your phone or anything. Some people get better battery with one and some get better battery without. I just avoid task killers because I had a bad experience. I use my phone as an alarm and one day it did not go off because I had killed the clock app. Ofcourse you can use a task killer and not have this problem by setting apps to ignore but after several weeks of not using it I noticed my battery is not better or worse so to each his own.
BTW I also used advanced task manager and thats a perfectly good task manager if you do decide to keep using it.
Best thing you can do is install and use it for a couple days to see if you like it. I have used one since my Droid and would not consider uninstalling. I notice an immediate improvement in the smoothness of my phone while using, and a noticeable choppiness when not using. Your mileage may vary, but I would give it a shot for yourself vs. just listening to others opinions.
87Octane said:
While I agree that a task killer is not needed it is not bad. I mean using one wont cause damage to your phone or anything.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1
If you kill a task and free up memory, Android just fills up that memory again with a program of its own choosing. If it needs the memory, it intelligently pulls programs out of memory on its own.
So I upgraded to 2.2 with the downloadable rom yesterday and was wondering what is going on with the Task killers. I read on some of the comments for the app that on 2.2 task killers are not needed for some reason or another, can anyone confirm??
zackhow said:
So I upgraded to 2.2 with the downloadable rom yesterday and was wondering what is going on with the Task killers. I read on some of the comments for the app that on 2.2 task killers are not needed for some reason or another, can anyone confirm??
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Task killers were never needed and can actually do more harm than good. Plenty of information on that floating all over the net and here on the forums. With Froyo, they are definitely not needed, as it has improved memory management, which means it is better at figuring out what tasks to leave running and which ones to kill. Just let Android take care of tasks for you. If you do a factory reset and don't install a task killer, reboot every so often instead, you will see a great performance boost on any version of Android and better battery life. Task killers generally do nothing for battery life, as most tasks aren't using battery, only memory. The only time that tasks use battery most times is when they are actively accessing your location or using data. So just limit what apps can do those things in the background through their settings and you'll get great battery life without screwing up your system.
I guess I never really tested how my battery did without the task killer seeing how that was one of the first apps I got. I will agree that if i restarted my phone I saw a little performance/battery boost. Thanks for the tips, gonna remove the app.
Now I agree with superlinkx but DAMN if Sprint bloatware apps aren't up constantly on their own and running. Now i'm not talking about the basic stuff but Sprint Navigation (big one...try leaving Google Maps open and see what it does to your battery) plus a few of the others. I know it's cute to say Task Killers are irrelevant in Android...but I think that applies to Stock Android more so than a HTC Sense Android. I have a task killer setup to auto-kill safe all the sprint stuff when the screen is turned. I noticed a big jump in battery performance. Just my .02 though, every phone seems to be a bit different.