[Hero, G2 Touch Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jayjay:
Here's my tip, that works really well, for me. I've tried a myriad of task managers, but finally settled for TaskPanel. It doesn't really matter what you use, I suppose, but I found it to be one of the clearest. Furthermore, advanced task killer's and taskillers "kill all" commands seemed to randomly kill the TouchFlo process as well, even though it was "ignored"...

I've come to the conclusion that cpu load rarely is a problem on this phone (in terms of finding a reason to possible lag), unless you are watching videos (which you probably won't, since it appears to be impossible to encode videos so they don't at least slow down a bit every five seconds) or listening to music.

Instead it's the amount of memory you have free for apps to use. I have no idea why, since I also live by the credo "memory free is memory wasted", so ideally my phone would have 5 megs of ram free and everything would work great. Now for some reason, my Hero desktop starts to lag substantially (as well as other gui-elements, such as long scrolling lists) whenever my memory goes below 40 megs.

I always hated the "favourite people" widget by Htc, so I closed it day one. Maybe that's why my htc experience has been pretty positive. I also closed the desktop widgets for SMS-messages and Mail, since they can't show MMS:es or HTML-mail and since they are both ridiculously slow at flicking from one message to the next. I also threw away the novelty clocks by Htc, since they animate too often and that slows down the interface while they are moving. Instead I opted for the iPhone-like clock "digital clock widget". Just don't force kill it, since it will stop updating and you will be stuck with a beautiful clock that shows the right time once every day.

So basically, my formula for a fluid hero experience is:

* Check your free memory with TaskPanel every now and then. If it goes below 50, prepare for slowdown. If it goes below 40, go on a killingspree.

* Register TaskPanel as an "ongoing service", so it shows up in your notification drawer. Now, if you can see your notification drawer (which you can't in the browser), then instead of clicking home to close stuff, open TaskPanel (or whatever) and kill the app you are about to stop using.

* With multitasking comes responsibility. Odds are, if you ever owned an iPhone, this is something you were *****in and moanin about. "Gimme multitasking, gimme!". Well now you've got it and so, learn to use it. Everything that is slow, badly programmed or a resource hog has gotta go, unless you really really need it. Beautiful clock animating slowly? Too bad! Ditch it.

Somebody said Android wold be very good at managing resources by itself and that sounds reasonable. However, I read numerous comments about people finding this to not be the case. Maybe in version 2.0. But for now I'm stuck killing of processes myself. It works for me and makes my UI snappy. And I can keep 3-5 apps running at the same time (that are my own choices, not mandatory apps that come with the UI) without problem. I regularly have babbler, androidirc, taskpanel, market, ebuddy, redditisfun running at the same time without problem. Just kill off apps you are not going to use for a long time.

Ok, sorry to be rambling, but this is my take on the situation. It might get resolved with the Hero update or with the 2.0 version of Android. Don't know, but until then, we need some tools and wild speculation won't solve anything. If you made it through the whole message, I would appreciate your comments - especially any positive experiences you have from "letting Android do its own cleaning". It sounds a little fishy that it would be bad a first, but after about a week, things will get really snappy? What if I boot my phone? Will I have to wait a week again for things to become fast?

-JJ