Develop Bugs

Task killer/battery life

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

[Q] Why no ones talk about the lag cause by Insufficient memory

I notice the phone start lagging when there are less than 100Meg of available RAM on both 2.1 or 2.2 SGS.
Questions....
1. How do i make sure there will always be min 130 available when not in use?
I'm currently using Froyo Task Manager, ATK and SystemPanel together to make that happen manually. A better suggestion or use of them will be appreciated.
I also tried MemoryPlus and Taskkiller (The red android logo)
2. There are so many background service running some of them start with com.samsung.... (what are these?) do we need them?
3. Why some Apps always run without us telling them to run, or ask us to give them to permission to run on background at will?

ATK
In ATK in settings you have auto kill level, which is disabled on default.

jakaka said:
In ATK in settings you have auto kill level, which is disabled on default.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm using JPC, ATK autokill will not able to kill at a system level like SystemPanel, so after a day of active use, the memory will still continue to reduce as some of the background service start consuming more and more memory or run more background process. E.g. Touchwiz from 17 Meg to 25 Meg.
So at the start with ATK, i will have 130Meg, after a day of active use i left with 80Meg. With Apps killed.

I use autokiller set to aggressive. memory left 152mb

ivanchin99 said:
I use autokiller set to aggressive. memory left 152mb
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Cool, does that remain for few days? How often do you restart your phone?

free memory is bad memory!
why don't let android do it's job?! this ist linux with a clever memory management, not windows 95!!! deinstall all auto task killer android is handling the memory very well. it uses all it can get and if it's not enough it kills old uses apps from it. why have free memory, there is absolutely no reson for that! ram is fast, let the often used apps be there not on slow sd or nand!

Mykron said:
free memory is bad memory!
why don't let android do it's job?! this ist linux with a clever memory management, not windows 95!!! deinstall all auto task killer android is handling the memory very well. it uses all it can get and if it's not enough it kills old uses apps from it. why have free memory, there is absolutely no reson for that! ram is fast, let the often used apps be there not on slow sd or nand!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
QFT!
What is the point of having memory if it is constantly empty?
Think about it this way...If you had five friends at your house and you have five chairs, do you make 2 or 3 of your friends stand so there is always empty space or do you let everyone sit down and worry about something worthwhile?

Finguz said:
QFT!
What is the point of having memory if it is constantly empty?
Think about it this way...If you had five friends at your house and you have five chairs, do you make 2 or 3 of your friends stand so there is always empty space or do you let everyone sit down and worry about something worthwhile?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
True, upto a certain point... I don't think you need to have at least 100 or 150 mb free but it DOES seem to help to not let it get down to like 30mb...

For me:
-JM7
-animations off
-voodoo lag fix
-minfree manager set to preset agressive.
minfree manager customizes the android memory management system.
I love it this way, No lags when starting the Phone (DIALER) or anything else. The dialer annoys me the must, this must be lag free, if i want to dial i want to dial right away.

Btw, I think you have made some wrong assumptions about the Android memory management system, as mentioned, unused ram is wasted ram.

dagrim1 said:
True, upto a certain point... I don't think you need to have at least 100 or 150 mb free but it DOES seem to help to not let it get down to like 30mb...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Agreed but I have never seen my Galaxy with free memory that low and I don't use a task killer. Of course I don't often have more than 3 or 4 apps running at the same time

This is not about letting ram do nothing.you surely don't wasn't your ram get used up by programs you don't want while you had no hand in this.All those services running I don't want.badly written programs that are hanging out in memory instead of closing.at least in symbian an app closed when you exited.

Why would you have 100MB free ? Do you have any application that needs 100MB to run ?! The android system already has enough memory to run so even if you could have 200MB of free memory you phone wouldn't run any faster you would just be able to lauch around 20 apps at the same time.
Read this:
http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/
Linux however isn’t generally affected by this. While I admit that I don’t know the architecture and reason for this… linux will run the same regardless of if you have 20mb free memory or 200mb.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Finguz said:
Agreed but I have never seen my Galaxy with free memory that low and I don't use a task killer. Of course I don't often have more than 3 or 4 apps running at the same time
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Dunno, I just noticed that one time my phone was VERY sluggish and memory free was around 20mb or so. Cleaning it up did seem to help (unless one of the programs killed was causing the lag of course).
Ah well... Whatever people choose right?

You guys can argue all you want that free RAM is a waste of RAM....
But it is a fact that the SGS runs much slower when the free RAM is low. This is the experience of all the SGS'es I have tried and my own as well. At least this is the case when running 2.1. I have not tested anyone with 2.2 yet.

It s starts to lag when memory is below 40 mb. So when it s low and you start an application it starts to lag. I set it to 50-55-60 and got hardly any lag. No need to keep so much free ram
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App

matty___ said:
It s starts to lag when memory is below 40 mb. So when it s low and you start an application it starts to lag. I set it to 50-55-60 and got hardly any lag. No need to keep so much free ram
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Which ROM are you using? as the low memory killer level for background apps is set at 40M which means you should have 40M free all the time or it will start killing background apps. This is also why task killers are useless, free ram is wasted ram for android.
I never had the experience that more free RAM is faster, perhaps with the stock rom but JC and upwards are all good by default. Animations off + Oneclick lagfix (or another) and the phone stays totally lag free.
Being an android user for 1,5 years now i'm very confident Taskkillers are useless except when an app is stuck. I've had periods where I used them allot but the phone only gets slower as the killed apps have to be loaded into the memory again.

Finguz said:
QFT!
What is the point of having memory if it is constantly empty?
Think about it this way...If you had five friends at your house and you have five chairs, do you make 2 or 3 of your friends stand so there is always empty space or do you let everyone sit down and worry about something worthwhile?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Provided you are not expecting anymore friends. The problem happens if all your 5 friends are happily seated and along comes 2 more friends a-visiting. So you have to now move 2 inactive (for want of a better word) friends out of the seats so that you can accommodate the 2 new ones. This takes time. So why not move these friends out as soon as they become inactive so that the space is readily available when someone comes calling?

Try to have a read about garbage collector before argueing about free memory.
The more you try to have a large amount of memory, the more you will need major GC (and during major GC all activity is frozen).
If you let the system manage memory, it does minor GC as needed when it reaches min memory waterline (seems to be 50Mo on SGS).
Let the system do its job.
Get rid of task killer.

Mykron said:
free memory is bad memory!
why don't let android do it's job?! this ist linux with a clever memory management, not windows 95!!! deinstall all auto task killer android is handling the memory very well. it uses all it can get and if it's not enough it kills old uses apps from it. why have free memory, there is absolutely no reason for that! ram is fast, let the often used apps be there not on slow sd or nand!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I completely disagree. OK, it is better to use memory, but the android memory management is extremely inefficient since it does not know which foreground and background processes are important to the user and which are not, even though it tries to figure that out. Since the Galaxy S does not allow the system to use the full 512MB of memory, this can be a critical factor. And the Galaxy S definitely lags massively when less then 70 or so MB of free RAM is available this is definitely a fact.
The biggest problem is that you cannot manually close apps and only have multitasking access to the last 6 apps used. If you use 7 apps simultaneously, the 1st app still consumes memory but you cannot even switch back to it. And there are so many useless background processes, starting up over and over again and consuming hundreds of MB memory if they are not killed in regular fashion.
Who needs gesture search, amazon mp3, layar, and all the samsung crap running in the background all the time. If you only have 10 such applications and each of them only consumes 15MB of ram, 150MB are wasted for nothing.
Every second market application registers itself as autostart on every boot, so to use a autostart manager is also mandatory.
Since everybody can easily develop for Android the application quality and resource efficiency is not always perfect. So in my opinion Android needs a task manager, this is why even Samsung integrates such a application.
Using a well configured ATK (set to ignore system applications, widgets and apps frequently used for multitasking and killing every else on screen off) and autokiller (strict setting) in addition to Autostart Manager (had to remove 40!!! useless apps from automatic startup) and lagfix, the SGS runs perfectly smooth.

[Q] Total memory less than 768 MB???

Can anyone explain the amount of RAM that this phone is suppose to have?
The specs for the phone lists 768 MB. However, the total memory that comes up is 617940 kB.
Thanks.

Bull Shot said:
Can anyone explain the amount of RAM that this phone is suppose to have?
The specs for the phone lists 768 MB. However, the total memory that comes up is 617940 kB.
Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
where are you finding this number? i am at 758 MB. since i have a bunch of apps installed, that would seem about right.

How are you guys getting so much free ram? When I check on Task Killer, whenever I kill all the apps I'm not using it usually shows 358 mb ... and programs I'm not using automatically keep running (i.e Maps).

hmm maybe im not checking the right place? i'm getting my 758 mb number from settings--SD and phone storage. the internal phone storage tells me 758mb.
on an unrelated note though, you shouldn't use task killers. they are considered by most to be more of a drain on your battery life as android is already setup to manage closing unused apps on its own.

Many people use the term "memory" to mean system memory as well as storage. I try to avoid calling system storage as "memory" and tend to use "storage" instead, or refer to the type of storage.
Total ram is around 768mb. Part of it is reserved (not sure why, possibly for filesystem caching) so around 603mb is available. For this platform that is a healthy chunk of RAM to work with. Even with my hefty usage I have ~126mb free.
Internal storage is something like 2gb, with it partially consumed by the Android install as well as NAND configuration adjustments for reliability which cause some of the storage space to be consumed through hardware (there's an excellent explanation of this somewhere, don't have a link handy), resulting in about 1.1gb being available. I have 103 apps installed, 523.5mb of the internal storage used, with 638.8mb available.
There was an excellent tool posted on xda (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1066060) called Android Optimizer that gives a lot of good information about memory, storage, cpu usage, etc. I'd recommend checking it out. It's not available on the market and it is a little buggy so use it with a bit of caution if you choose to use any of the optimization functions.

cool. thanks for the explanation nimdae!

There have been so, so, so many posts on this topic that I will not rehash them all here. Instead, I will ask a simple question: For what do you use all that free RAM?
Ask yourself that question, and be serious about it. I think you will find yourself uninstalling your task managers and memory optimizers before long.
Edit: to avoid unnecessary discussion, Watchdog is in fact neither of those, and I would highly recommend it as the only memory app you will ever need.
Edit 2: the total RAM displayed is the RAM that is actually available to be used by anything the user may want to run. As a poster earlier said, the system reserves a certain amount of RAM for its own use to keep important processes moving along. The reserved RAM is not available, and so doesn't appear in total RAM. Unless you want to uninstall the OS. Then you could have access to all 768 MBs.

I would like to reiterate why you should not use automatic task killers.
As of, I believe, Android 2.0, the garbage collection and memory management was significantly improved. However, this was not a new system in Android, it always existed.
How it works:
If you haven't noticed with Android, when you leave an app, it doesn't close it unless the app specifically does something to end the process. This is by design. Android allows the app to remain in memory. Frequently used apps will load faster with this design. A "task" that is not killed and is in the background ONLY consumes memory, it does not "run" (in Linux terms, the process is actually in a "stopped" state so the task can't do anything anyway). Only a "service" can run in the background. Most apps that have long running services have lightweight services.
If an application loads that requires more memory than is available, Android will examine backgrounded tasks for candidates to be killed to free up memory. This makes it so as many tasks as possible can remain in memory for better performance. In understanding this, you should know that if you have a large amount of memory, and memory usage is high, this is a GOOD THING. With the amount of memory in the I2, there is a lot of breathing space for this.
There is one other case where a backgrounded task will be killed: if it has been in the background for a certain period of time without being brought forward. Killing a task to free up memory to load another task can actually be a little cpu expensive (but not THAT much) so this can make it slightly easier.
Please note that backgrounded tasks WILL NOT contribute to battery drain. Only tasks at the front and services will. Killing your backgrounded calculator will do nothing for you other than free that small amount of memory it uses. Used memory does not contribute to extra battery drain as DRAM refreshes happen on ALL cells anyway.
Background services can also be made candidates for being killed. If an app needs more memory than can be made available by killing backgrounded tasks, then services become targets to be killed as well.
Automatic task killers cause a couple of problems. A less major problem is you lose that one benefit you get by keeping tasks in the background: performance. I don't just mean how fast it loads. If it can bring a backgrounded task to the front from memory rather than load from storage, you remove extra processing to load the app, including storage access, that contribute to higher battery drain. The other problem is a poorly configured task killer can break things like notifications.
Managing your services is always a good idea. Having a lot of services running means background processes that are capable of contributing to battery drain. Additionally, there are apps with misbehaving services (services that consume resources or use features they shouldn't). While I'm against automatic task killers, using something to monitor and manage services is a good idea. Just always keep in mind the implications for killing a service: it may affect a feature to an app that you would rather not impact.

Excellent explanation nimdae! Task killers are the devil.

On another note, my posts are getting too long...

nimdae said:
On another note, my posts are getting too long...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Everything is longer in Texas.

xgunther said:
Everything is longer in Texas.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's what s...no, that's too easy.
Move along, nothing to see.

Before I read this I was like a task Nazi. I killed my tasks often, but now I think I will just let them be. Nice write up BTW. Very informative.
Sent from my ADR6350 using XDA App

TB13 said:
Before I read this I was like a task Nazi. I killed my tasks often, but now I think I will just let them be. Nice write up BTW. Very informative.
Sent from my ADR6350 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Remember: I'm not saying don't manage things. Poorly behaving services are the #1 cause of high battery drain (at least on non-LTE devices), and this will be even more problematic when you overclock.

xgunther said:
Excellent explanation nimdae! Task killers are the devil.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I tried not using them and I get better battery life with them...I use it maybe 3 times a day after heavy multi tasking. It's to each their own..but I see results for it..like 5 extra hours.
Sent from my ADR6350 using XDA Premium App

knipp21 said:
I tried not using them and I get better battery life with them...I use it maybe 3 times a day after heavy multi tasking. It's to each their own..but I see results for it..like 5 extra hours.
Sent from my ADR6350 using XDA Premium App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you get that much extra, you have a misbehaving app. Better to get the app developer to fix it or find an alternative.

nimdae said:
If you get that much extra, you have a misbehaving app. Better to get the app developer to fix it or find an alternative.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
True, I don't need to use it often though lol
Sent from my ADR6350 using XDA Premium App

I'm in Texas as well.
sent from a phone without root.

I use a task killer only to manually kill an app that freezes or something. Its easier than going to manage applications. I have the autokill disabled.
Sent from my ADR6350 using XDA Premium App

AngelsPunishment said:
I use a task killer only to manually kill an app that freezes or something. Its easier than going to manage applications. I have the autokill disabled.
Sent from my ADR6350 using XDA Premium App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
CyanogenMod (maybe other ROMs) have a feature to kill a frozen app by holding the back button (long press, whatever). However, this can also be an annoyance on systems where for unknown reasons it registers a long press on a tap (my eris did this a lot).

[Q] Noob question?

hi, i wanna ask
i download an app manager to my phone,
Facebook,PS Pocket,Xperia Play,Maps is always there, even i close it on task manager, after a sec, it is there again and eating ram,
and one more thing, i got a problem,
theres no list on "More games" on xperia play,
thanks

Jahy420 said:
hi, i wanna ask
i download an app manager to my phone,
Facebook,PS Pocket,Xperia Play,Maps is always there, even i close it on task manager, after a sec, it is there again and eating ram,
and one more thing, i got a problem,
theres no list on "More games" on xperia play,
thanks
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ok first of all there is something you need to understand! NEVER USE A TASK MANAGER! They are useless. Android isnt like windows, having lots of free ram does not improve performance. Infact it hinders it. The following paragraph is taken from lifehacker.
"In Android, processes and Applications are two different things. An app can stay "running" in the background without any processes eating up your phone's resources. Android keeps the app in its memory so it launches more quickly and returns to its prior state. When your phone runs out of memory, Android will automatically start killing tasks on its own, starting with ones that you haven't used in awhile.
The problem is that Android uses RAM differently than, say, Windows. On Android, having your RAM nearly full is a good thing. It means that when you relaunch an app you've previously opened, the app launches quickly and returns to its previous state. So while Android actually uses RAM efficiently, most users see that their RAM is full and assume that's what's slowing down their phone. In reality, your CPU—which is only used by apps that are actually active—is almost always the bottleneck."
As for the more games option. If your using the .145 firmware. You need to reinstall "moregames.apk" if your using the latest firmware. You need to reinstall "fun&games.apk"

oh i see.
ummm more games is lost because of new update?? =.=
where can i get fun&games.apk ?
thankkss

hii, where can i get fun&games.apk?

AndroHero said:
Ok first of all there is something you need to understand! NEVER USE A TASK MANAGER! They are useless. Android isnt like windows, having lots of free ram does not improve performance. Infact it hinders it. The following paragraph is taken from lifehacker.
"In Android, processes and Applications are two different things. An app can stay "running" in the background without any processes eating up your phone's resources. Android keeps the app in its memory so it launches more quickly and returns to its prior state. When your phone runs out of memory, Android will automatically start killing tasks on its own, starting with ones that you haven't used in awhile.
The problem is that Android uses RAM differently than, say, Windows. On Android, having your RAM nearly full is a good thing. It means that when you relaunch an app you've previously opened, the app launches quickly and returns to its previous state. So while Android actually uses RAM efficiently, most users see that their RAM is full and assume that's what's slowing down their phone. In reality, your CPU—which is only used by apps that are actually active—is almost always the bottleneck."
As for the more games option. If your using the .145 firmware. You need to reinstall "moregames.apk" if your using the latest firmware. You need to reinstall "fun&games.apk"
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
See this is interesting. I just installed Task Panel and have it so it closes apps and opens up RAM every time I put the phone to sleep. I did it mostly to save battery. I consistently had my RAM at less than 50MB before the manager. Now it's usually above 120MB. My fear is battery life, and obviously performance in emulators and games like Minecraft.

El_Colombiano said:
See this is interesting. I just installed Task Panel and have it so it closes apps and opens up RAM every time I put the phone to sleep. I did it mostly to save battery. I consistently had my RAM at less than 50MB before the manager. Now it's usually above 120MB. My fear is battery life, and obviously performance in emulators and games like Minecraft.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you learnt about android you would know that you device would function better when you had less than 50mb ram
Sent from my R800i using Tapatalk

Just got my Galaxy Nexus from Bell :D Few gripes..

Hey everyone I just got my Galaxy Nexus from Bell and it isn nothing short of amazing. Screen is amazing compared to my milestone which is basically the international version of the Droid. So far, I have experienced lag only after loading up approximately 10-15 apps which I never do on a daily basis, so lag isn't an issue with this phone. Now, I do have a few issues.
1.) The wifi keeps disconnecting while I try to download the files for shadowgun
2.) The speakers are REALLY quiet.
3.) When I use advanced task killer the ram available is always under 300mb even if i kill all apps (is it optimized for ICS?)
4.) The multi touch barely works?? (Download a multitouch tester app... when you have one finger on the left side, the bottom right side wont detect your other finger?? Noticable in shadowgun, if you are moving, you can't look around via the bottom left of the screen...
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App

mohitrocks said:
Hey everyone I just got my Galaxy Nexus from Bell and it isn nothing short of amazing. Screen is amazing compared to my milestone which is basically the international version of the Droid. So far, I have experienced lag only after loading up approximately 10-15 apps which I never do on a daily basis, so lag isn't an issue with this phone. Now, I do have a few issues.
1.) The wifi keeps disconnecting while I try to download the files for shadowgun
2.) The speakers are REALLY quiet.
3.) When I use advanced task killer the ram available is always under 300mb even if i kill all apps (is it optimized for ICS?)
4.) The multi touch barely works?? (Download a multitouch tester app... when you have one finger on the left side, the bottom right side wont detect your other finger??
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
1) Samsung phones tend not to have as good wifi reception as others. See if you can move closer to the router.
2) You can use an app like Volume+ to boost it a bit.
3) The available RAM should be about 600+ MB. The app is probably not optimised for ICS. Anyway there really should be no reason to clear apps from RAM unless it is actively using CPU.
4) Multitouch is fine for me using "Multitouch Test" app from the market.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App

mohitrocks said:
3.) When I use advanced task killer the ram available is always under 300mb even if i kill all apps (is it optimized for ICS?)
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
People worry too much about free RAM. As a professional programmer (though not Android), power user, and hacker of almost any device or computer I use, I can tell you that free RAM is wasted RAM. Does the device work well for you? Unless you have a specific reason to believe that lack of available memory is affecting your experience, you shouldn't worry about it.
I expect any device I use (computer, phone, tablet, server, anything) to be making as much use of the RAM available to it as possible. The operating system should be caching as much as it can in memory to increase performance and enhance your user experience. Caching will normally show up as unavailable RAM, but any decent operating system (even Windows, haha) will dump cache and make it available for applications as needed.
Please don't take this the wrong way... I only ever comment on such things try to be informative. I honestly wouldn't worry about it, unless you're experiencing a problem directly related to available memory, such as an app (or worse, the OS!) leaking memory and causing lags or the inability to open new apps, etc.
There's also the whole thing about how you shouldn't even be using a task killer... but there are already enough threads on XDA about that topic, so I won't get into that here
And finally I will say... I'm jealous! I haven't pre-ordered, because I want to bargin with Bell a bit, but I'll be heading to Bell tomorrow and I hope they have a Galaxy Nexus in stock!

lol @ wanting to have free RAM

that was very informative!. I bought mine from virgin in Toronto Eaton Centre,with $50 off because I told him I don't want the case.(They give free case on the pre-launched date,don't know about tomorrow tho.)gl with your bargin!

BootsSiR said:
lol @ wanting to have free RAM
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Haha seriously.
Uninstall that task killer. Jesus do people not learn?

From everything I have read it seems that task killers only really interfere with Androids OS. I've never used one and the system seems to run fine =]

mohitrocks said:
Hey everyone I just got my Galaxy Nexus from Bell and it isn nothing short of amazing. Screen is amazing compared to my milestone which is basically the international version of the Droid.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Glad to see I am not the only one coming from a Milestone, haha. Leaps and bounds are the words that come to mind.

martonikaj said:
Haha seriously.
Uninstall that task killer. Jesus do people not learn?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Maybe he wants to have free RAM to run something else that consumes a lot of RAM? Did you ever think of that?
It's like making fun of someone who is trying to make money and asking them "why do you want money? You can't eat it! LOL..."
Well, no duh. The point of making money is to exchange it for things you want...

Chirality said:
Maybe he wants to have free RAM to run something else that consumes a lot of RAM? Did you ever think of that?
It's like making fun of someone who is trying to make money and asking them "why do you want money? You can't eat it! LOL..."
Well, no duh. The point of making money is to exchange it for things you want...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You also don't understand then I suppose. If he wants free RAM to run something else, that foreground app will take the RAM away from anything else in the background that is unnecessary (obviously the foreground app is more important). But this isn't something he has to do (or think about doing). The process is not like: working with app X, then deallocating memory manually, then starting app Y. Rather, it's using app X, then starting app Y and if Y needs memory that X is using, X disappears automatically and Y continues to run with its necessary resources.
As stated above, free RAM is wasted RAM. His (and many other's) quest to have as much free RAM as possible is a terrible goal to have that overall hurts the user experience. Freeing RAM for the sake of looking at a screen that tells you a certain number (omg higher # is better!!!!) isn't the proper way to be managing your device.
Anyways, this isn't a task killer thread. Several other topics were raised by OP.

martonikaj said:
You also don't understand then I suppose. If he wants free RAM to run something else, that foreground app will take the RAM away from anything else in the background that is unnecessary (obviously the foreground app is more important). But this isn't something he has to do (or think about doing). The process is not like: working with app X, then deallocating memory manually, then starting app Y. Rather, it's using app X, then starting app Y and if Y needs memory that X is using, X disappears automatically and Y continues to run with its necessary resources.
As stated above, free RAM is wasted RAM. His (and many other's) quest to have as much free RAM as possible is a terrible goal to have that overall hurts the user experience. Freeing RAM for the sake of looking at a screen that tells you a certain number (omg higher # is better!!!!) isn't the proper way to be managing your device.
Anyways, this isn't a task killer thread. Several other topics were raised by OP.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ugh...I guess I'll have to keep using the analogy to get through to you...
So you ask the guy why he wants to make money, because "extra money is wasted money" since you can't eat the money, right? He tells you "so I can use the money to buy other things I need." Then you ask him, "why do you need to make more money to buy other things you need? Your house is worth a lot of money, if you ever need other things, just sell your house!"
Do you understand it now? The house is some background process that's important to the user, which the user wants to keep resident in memory. The other things are other apps that the user might run. If the user keeps running other apps, eventually Android will need to reclaim memory. But the user doesn't want to lose his house (i.e. doesn't want that important background process closed)! How to make sure Android doesn't do that? Here's an idea: why not have some extra money to spend on things (i.e. free up memory by killing the non-important apps so the important one doesn't get killed)?
This...really isn't that difficult of a concept to understand. I don't get why you feel the need to bash everyone who wants to kill processes. Sure, a lot of people use task killers for stupid reasons. But you can't always assume the worst in people. How do you know that he's killing processes just to stare at the free memory graph? You don't know that. You are just assuming it. You can't rule out this legitimate use for manual process management.

Your analogy is completely flawed. The analogy of getting more money in terms of RAM is by opening the phone and putting another RAM chip in the phone, not by freeing RAM through a task killer. Freeing RAM with a killer is just shifting money around. You're not creating more RAM by killing apps, you're just moving it around.
He has a limited income in this case. He can't open his phone and put more RAM in it. If you're on a limited income and can't just "make more money" then if you want to buy a new car and don't have money, you have to sell something. The thing is, he's trying to do it manually. The phone will handle it automatically. It will choose what will be killed in order to free RAM for the front-facing process.
So you're getting the same amount of RAM either way. You have 1GB in the entire system to use. Whether you manage it manually or let the phone do it automatically, you still have 1GB of RAM. The difference is, when you do it manually, you are less efficient than letting the phone handle it. You kill things unnecessarily, kill things you shouldn't, and you spend extra time doing it.

martonikaj said:
Your analogy is completely flawed. The analogy of getting more money in terms of RAM is by opening the phone and putting another RAM chip in the phone, not by freeing RAM through a task killer. Freeing RAM with a killer is just shifting money around. You're not creating more RAM by killing apps, you're just moving it around.
He has a limited income in this case. He can't open his phone and put more RAM in it. If you're on a limited income and can't just "make more money" then if you want to buy a new car and don't have money, you have to sell something. The thing is, he's trying to do it manually. The phone will handle it automatically. It will choose what will be killed in order to free RAM for the front-facing process.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, I know it's not a perfect analogy. But how about you point out the flaw in my use case, rather than the flaw in my analogy?
The problem is exactly that the phone "will choose what will be killed in order to free RAM". What if you want to choose what gets killed and what doesn't, and not let Android decide? What if you know exactly what you want to keep resident in memory and what's unimportant and can be killed?

Just out of curiosity, wanted to know how the OP got his bell GN so fast?
Preordered mine and waiting impatiently!
Sent from my Nexus S using Tapatalk

Basically he's saying that he's not gaining anything by rearranging his RAM. The system will free up RAM from background processes if need be. Him freeing up RAM and having available RAM doing nothing is not beneficial.

Chirality said:
How about you point out the flaw in my use case, rather than the flaw in my analogy?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You analogy is flawed because you have no idea what you're talking about. Your use case makes no sense. If the background app staying in RAM is more important than the foreground app, why are you using the foreground app? It should be in the background because its less important apparently.
Whether you manage things manually or not, if you are using the foreground app actively (ahem, its in the foreground) and it needs more RAM, then the other apps will be killed. Everything but the foreground app will be 100% wiped from RAM if it needs to. You can't tell it not to. If you want things to act differently, you'll have to write your own OS that never kills a background process sitting in RAM. And it'll suck.
What you want, and what a task killer offers, are 2 completely different things.
I'll go ahead and set this link right here just in case you want some more learnin'.
---------- Post added at 11:32 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:27 PM ----------
gdap said:
Just out of curiosity, wanted to know how the OP got his bell GN so fast?
Preordered mine and waiting impatiently!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Are they not available in-store to pickup? Maybe he did that rather than order for delivery.

martonikaj said:
You analogy is flawed because you have no idea what you're talking about. Your use case makes no sense. If the background app staying in RAM is more important than the foreground app, why are you using the foreground app? It should be in the background because its less important apparently.
Whether you manage things manually or not, if you are using the foreground app actively (ahem, its in the foreground), then the other app will be killed. If you want things to act differently, you'll have to write your own OS that never kills a background process sitting in RAM.
What you want, and what a task killer offers, are 2 completely different things.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Oh for crying out loud, how is this not getting through to you.
I'm not talking about killing the foreground app to make room for the background app. I'm talking about how to choose amongst the different background apps which one to kill.
Let's say that in order to make room for a foreground, Android has to kill one of two background apps. Most of the time you probably don't care which one it kills. But what if in this case the user cares very much, and want one to be killed but the other to stay in memory? Why not use a task killer to kill the unimportant one so the important one stays in memory? Is this seriously a hard concept for you to grasp?
Let's not get into personal attacks about knowledge here. I can assure you, I know more about memory management than you do, since I've seen the stuff you post around here. I've written my own garbage collectors, my own implementation of malloc/free/realloc that beats the glibc implementation in both performance and utilization. I know the pros and cons of most of the major memory allocator implementations out there, I know which allocator data structures are better at utilizing TLB cache and which ones have better worst-case performance. I know when to use compacting GC and when to use simple generational mark and sweep GC. You want to tell me I don't know what I'm talking about?

Chirality said:
Oh for crying out loud, how is this not getting through to you.
I'm not talking about killing the foreground app to make room for the background app. I'm talking about how to choose amongst the different background apps which one to kill.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You realize that a task manager doesn't offer you this utility. Killing something manually means that it will simply re-open and be there right after you're done killing it. If it wants to run, it will run.
Let's say that in order to make room for a foreground, Android has to kill one of two background apps. Most of the time you probably don't care which one it kills. But what if in this case the user cares very much, and want one to be killed but the other to stay in memory? Why not use a task killer to kill the unimportant one so the important one stays in memory? Is this seriously a hard concept for you to grasp?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If its that important, you won't put it in the background. Again Task Killers don't offer you this functionality actively. Killing something then quickly opening your foreground app is the most inefficient way to operate this, and still doesn't accomplish what you want with frequency. As I said above, the app will simply re-open in the background and take up the RAM again if it is supposed to be running (we're always talking about well-performing and properly formed apps). If you never want it running in the background, you need to uninstall it.
Let's not get into personal attacks about knowledge here. I can assure you, I know more about memory management than you do, since I've seen the stuff you post around here. I've written my own garbage collectors, my own implementation of malloc/free/realloc that beats the glibc implementation in both performance and utilization. I know the pros and cons of most of the major memory allocator implementations out there, I know which allocator data structures are better at utilizing TLB cache and which ones have better worst-case performance. I know when to use compacting GC and when to use simple generational mark and sweep GC. You want to tell me I don't know what I'm talking about?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No, I'm sorry sir. Most respectfully as possible, you are wrong on this topic. Really. I'm not gonna argue with you on any of these things anymore. Anyone who runs Android or has written apps or mods or ROMs will agree with me.
Your crazy-ass examples of apps running in the background that you MUST have open is not the real-world case for what we're discussing, and should never be considered a reason for anyone to ever install a task killer. People are not using them for these reasons, and they're aimlessly installing them for the wrong reason. It is 100% ruining the experience of Android to install an Auto Task Killer.

martonikaj said:
You realize that a task manager doesn't offer you this utility. Killing something manually means that it will simply re-open and be there right after you're done killing it. If it wants to run, it will run.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Where the hell are you getting this nonsense? If it's just a normal app, how the hell is it going to run again after you kill it? Do you even understand how Android activities, intents, and services work?
martonikaj said:
If its that important, you won't put it in the background.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Do you really have no idea how Android works? Any app that is not currently visible on screen are in the background. How are you going to prevent apps from being put into the background? Is it really too much to ask in today's multitasking operating systems to have two things that you care about running at the same time, one in the foreground and one in the background?
martonikaj said:
No, I'm sorry sir. Most respectfully as possible, you are wrong on this topic. Really. I'm not gonna argue with you on any of these things anymore. Anyone who runs Android or has written apps or mods or ROMs will agree with me. Your crazy-ass examples of apps running in the background that you MUST have open is not the real-world case for what we're discussing, and should never be considered a reason for anyone to ever install a task killer.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
And that, then, just shows you have no understanding of how memory management works at all. The use case I described is the one of the most usual case there is in any multiprocessing environment. You think somehow Android is special with its ability to automatically manage memory? No, it's not. It's not radically different from any modern operating system with virtual memory. The main difference is that instead of swapping memory to disk, it just kills processes. The use case I describe is a straightforward case of multitasking on a virtual memory system. It's so basic that frankly I'm amazed you don't understand it. When you are running multiple processes at once, you want to be able to choose which ones are resident in memory and which ones are swapped (or, in Android's case, killed). The best way to do it under a memory constraint is simply to kill processes you don't care about. Really, really basic stuff. And you are supposed to be a computer science student?
Maybe this is all to abstract for you. Let me describe a simple real world case. You are traveling and you rely on Google Maps to get around. You want to keep it resident in memory so that you can always instantly open up Maps. But you also run a lot of other apps during your journey. Looking up stuff on the Internet, reading restaurant reviews, checking news and weather, etc. The thing is, these apps aren't all that important. You might open them once and never need them again that day. But if you open a certain number of these apps, say, 5, then Maps will get killed since it was the least recently used. How to prevent this? Simple. Everytime you are done with one of these non-essential apps, you just kill it. It's not important to have this app be instantly accessible the next time. Or you kill them after opening 2 or 3 or them. Whatever. The point is, by manually closing these apps, you ensure Android never runs low enough on memory to kill Maps, so Maps will always be resident in memory and can be pulled up at a moment's notice, which is what you want.
Is this such a crazy-ass thing to ask for? Is this not something normal that we do on our computers all the time?

Chirality said:
You are traveling and you rely on Google Maps to get around. You want to keep it resident in memory so that you can always instantly open up Maps. But you also run a lot of other apps during your journey. Looking up stuff on the Internet, reading restaurant reviews, checking news and weather, etc. The thing is, these apps aren't all that important. You might open them once and never need them again that day. But if you open a certain number of these apps, say, 5, then Maps will get killed since it was the least recently used. How to prevent this? Simple. Everytime you are done with one of these non-essential apps, you just kill it. It's not important to have this app be instantly accessible the next time. Or you kill them after opening 2 or 3 or them. Whatever. The point is, by manually closing these apps, you ensure Android never runs low enough on memory to kill Maps, so Maps will always be resident in memory and can be pulled up at a moment's notice, which is what you want.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is almost a non issue. Maps will save its state before it gets killed.
Also, if you're using maps throughout your journey multiple times, and these other apps are being used only once, the other apps will be killed first. But you do have a point in the case where if you open maps, use a bunch of apps, and fill up your ram to the point where android starts killing your oldest processes first(maps in this case). But as I mentioned before, maps, along with many other apps, will save their state so its not a big deal.
Overall, you are correct in saying a user might want control over which apps are never killed, which is why they would use a task manager, but there are probably many people who use task managers for the wrong reasons.