yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Nexus One General] veritasaequita:
wow great info and its really starting to help out after a few days. Think i got a pretty good question though. I understand the killing of apps and all of that now but what do yall think of a startup manager and picking and choosing before or while the system is booting (ive been using startup manager i found in the market). Just wanted to see what everyone thought. thanks, veritas
[Nexus One General] TurboTsi:
Good read, but what I use my task manager mostly for is to restart apps. I've been using skyfire for about a week and sometimes it just stops responding. That's when I go to the task manager and close the app then I can reopen it and its good.

Another example is when the texts don't send, I close the app in task manager and reopen it then it will send. This beats having to restart your phone imo.
[Nexus One General] Paul22000:
As discussed in the other thread, there must be something wrong with Opera not saving state correctly, since as you mentioned no other app behaves like this. However, before I answered, I decided to try out Opera mini for myself. I downloaded it last night and opened up several image-heavy tabs.

Then I opened up as many other apps as I could on my phone, just cycling through them pressing Play or Update etc to get all the heavy processes going, hoping Android would kill Opera. After a few dozen apps (especially a lot of Desire ones which are definitely heavy apps), I called it good and went to bed. This morning, I opened Opera and my tabs are still there just as I left them.

From the other thread, I'm thinking there must be an issue specifically with your phone or usage pattern Roger, because I too have never had any problems, not with Skyfire that I've been using throughout the past week, and now that I've tried it, not with Opera either.

Yeah, flashing Cyanogen etc would probably help quite a bit. I've never experienced or heard anyone have THAT many issues with browser reloads so it's most likely something specific to his phone.
[Nexus One General] RogerPodacter:
Re: FAQ: Why You Shouldn&#146;t Be Using a Task Killer with Android (geekfor.me)

It's not just opera though it happens a lot with even the default browser and other apps. But just so you know my phone is completely stock and I only have a few basic apps installed like opera, Google sky view, etc. No fancy apps or anything.

Anyway I posted to the Google forums yesterday and an actual employee responded today saying view are aware of this and are making the RAM management more aggressive in froyo 2.2 update. There are a lot of people over there posting with my same problem, so its not just me experiencing this.

And like I said, opera WILL stay running most of the time. So you can't just run it, go to bed, then see it the next day and think you don't have the issue. Because this issue happens exactly when it hurts the most, like when you need it, switch away read an email, come back and It's gone. I'm not making this up. Android has poor multitasking capabilities right now, and view know it and admitted they are fixing it (hopefully).
[Nexus One General] mgorman:
Re: FAQ: Why You Shouldn&#146;t Be Using a Task Killer with Android (geekfor.me)

I'm giving this a shot and seeing if I notice an improvement

-------------------------------------

Sent via the XDA Tapatalk App
[Nexus One General] Paul22000:
Can you link this thread? That sounds like great news!
[Nexus One General] moSess:
[/QUOTE]Now, a question. How about a program that polls for a signal, like google maps? Will it not look for things like my location? Please educate me, I want to believe.[/QUOTE]

Any ideas?
[Nexus One General] D200P13:
this is great but when running my nexus i still have things like PixelPipe to send photos to social sites and when left open it stayed open and never close. i got a task killer and put only apps to kill that i added on that are not required to run to be killed. i will install this task manager and uninstalling my task killer to see if its true for my apps. thanks!
[Nexus One General] RogerPodacter:
Re: FAQ: Why You Shouldn&#146;t Be Using a Task Killer with Android (geekfor.me)

Here's the link, its for the default default browser issue, but its the same fundamental problem.

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2171

There are other non official forums with threads even more specific to the opera issue in general.
[Nexus One General] Paul22000:
Oooooooooooooooooooooooh

Better page caching; that sounds awesome! Thanks for posting!

Makes me want FroYo even more! Should only be a few more weeks now until it gets leaked at Google I/O on the 19th :D :D
[Nexus One General] RogerPodacter:
Re: FAQ: Why You Shouldn&#146;t Be Using a Task Killer with Android (geekfor.me)

Damn I must have read that link wrong because I thought it referred to more aggressive RAM in addition to page caching.
[Nexus One General] daedelus82:
I never killed any processes until a few weeks ago, when I pulled my phone out of my pocket and noticed it was quite warm, so I loaded up SetCPU to see the temp and what profile it was running.

It was then that I noticed that the CPU was running at a constant 998MHz. So I opened OSMonitor to try and determine why, and noticed that xScope was using around 15% CPU all the time, in the background, and whilst the phone was sleeping, this was causing the CPU to upscale to 998MHz permanently and the phone to run hot/warm.

Needless to say I now have xScope killed automatically every time my phone sleeps. It may be poor coding, or the particular web page that was loaded I'm not sure, but killing the process resulted in the CPU dropping back to 245MHz.

So whilst this information is good 99% of the time, there are instances where task killers ARE beneficial.

My 2 cents
[Nexus One General] e4604:
Good info here, I was relentlessly using my task killer, and believe it or not my battery would drain significantly faster. I uninstalled it, and first thing i noticed was that when in the morning i unplug my phone my battery would stay at 98-99% consistently, as oppose to drastically dropping to 90-85% for no good reason.
[Nexus One General] Eclair~:
Why exactly would you allow your phone to be clocked that high while sleeping in the first place? It would be much more beneficial to set the phone at a lower amount to save battery, reduce heat output, and prevent things like that from happening without having to kill applications.

While you are doing some of the stated above, I must say I still find it odd that you would set your clocking diameters between the max amount while the phone is not being used - or, per se, while it is idle/sleeping. With my phone at 245mhz min/max, powersave (sleep/standby profile).. heat, battery, and etc. are not of my worries.
[Nexus One General] faraz1992:
I read somewhere that FroYo will introduce Dalvik VM which will bring about 250% increase in performance of the device..
[Nexus One General] mattisdada:
As what has been said about when Windows Vista was released:

"Unused memory, is wasted memory."

The OS is in general quite capable of managing memory, having apps "preloaded" in memory is great for the user, as applications will restore faster than when reading from disk (for virtrually all systems, reading from disk is the SLOWEST part of the system, minimising this is awesome. And as we all know, RAM is super quick. So it makes sense to leave applications in memory, as long as they are not using CPU cycles, mostly in Android though, they dont).

But i would still recommend leaving a task killer on your Android device, but leave it inactive (no auto kill). As sometimes its usefull to be able to take controll of what apps are running. But, as the OP said, use task killers wisely.....

Oh and, the higher amount of free RAM left does NOT equal greater performance :P.
[Nexus One General] daedelus82:
My sleep profile is currently 245/576 conservative.. The reason for this is I often use apps which run whilst the phone is sleeping, such as Google My Tracks when I'm cycling. I have found that setting it to 245/245 often ended up with poorly recorded tracks. Setting it to 245/576 *may* use more battery than 245/245, but not likely, it won't scale above 245 unless it's under load that warrants it, and being set to conservative it will only scale up one stepping.

My previous post still stands, there are valid uses for a taskkill apps, however like the OP said you should not kill everything just because you can.
[Nexus One General] Eclair~:
So applications, even with SetCpu set at a certain min/max can still overclock the phone beyond what the user has specified? As xScope did with you? I didn't know this, as it never happened to me - I was quite confused as how your phone got to 998mhz while in standby mode.. if you had set those specific parameters.
[Nexus One General] daedelus82:
My observations were made after finding the phone was warm (actually it was 40c I consider that quite hot) and waking it up to find out why.

The phone quickly cooled back down after killing xScope.. It must have been burning CPU cycles whilst the phone was asleep and causing the CPU to clock at 576.

Perhaps my original post should have read "causing the CPU to upscale to 998MHz (576MHz whilst sleeping)", but I didn't really think that piece of information was crucial to the point I was trying to make.

The key points were:

1. the phone was clocking @ max

2. it was running hot

3. the culprit was xScope; and

4. a task killer fixed it.
[Nexus One General] Paul22000:
Yes, there certainly are reasons to use task killers, such as killing poorly coded apps that are causing system slowdowns etc.

I wrestled with making the thread title "Why You Shouldn't Auto-Kill Apps" or "Why You Shouldn't Worry About Free Memory" versus matching what the linked post's title was. Maybe I should still change it, but hmm... It doesn't very good for a thread title "Why You Shouldn't Use Task Killers Except Once in a Blue Moon" :D
[Nexus One General] Clarkster:
The reason his phone was running full speed was xScope was preventing the phone from entering sleep. Just turning the screen off will not put it to sleep. If an application is keeping it awake it won't enter sleep.
[Nexus One General] nazrin313:
Re: FAQ: Why You Shouldn&#146;t Be Using a Task Killer with Android (geekfor.me)

Ive been trying this for a few days now and in terms of performance, I honestly dont see a difference if I end a task or not...so dat ends one argument, but sadly what I saw was that by not ending the tasks, my battery life was alot worse then before. When using the task killer,i could easily get 14-16 hours outta the battery, not using the task killer, I could hardly past 10hrs...

food for thought?
[Nexus One General] djmcnz:
Autostarts on the Market is what you're looking for. Can change (on/off) auto-start for any event trigger. Including system boot... get rid of all that crap.
[Nexus One General] djmcnz:
In that case I actually think you're reappropriating the "background" function for a use it's not intended. I'm not too surprised it doesn't work for you.

Your use case is better served with a browser that supports the "read later" function such as Dolphin. This will allow you to actually store your pages offline rather than just as a cached page.
[Nexus One General] djmcnz:
With all respect I have to disagree with this generalisation. I don't think it's necessarily good advice to follow. There's a good thread on SetCPU which pretty much covers why this advice is not generally applicable.

Although I do accept it is applicable in a certain set of cases (specifically not this one I think).
[Nexus One General] krabman:
If you are using it personally and have been for a while whats your short take?
[Nexus One General] djmcnz:
Yes, use it personally and have been for months. One of the best dollars I've spent.

You can disable any app from autostarting at boot, you can disable an app start for any event, you can disable unused widgets (won't even show in you widget list which I like) and you can revert it all back. It also provide complete transparency over what loads and when. It's quite amazing what loads that I never used.
[Nexus One General] Marine6680:
I have used a task killer to end a few apps I just use once or twice rarely and then just want to die, but that is rare in of itself. Other than "apps gone wild" I have found that some apps just like to use resources in the background for no good reason. I downloaded the "speed test" app from the market to play around with and test my network speeds around my home. I found my GPS was running continuously in the background, just like I had navigation running, even when the phone was in sleep mode. turns out the "speed test" app uses GPS for your location to determine the closest servers, rather than the network location service. I have uninstalled the app, because I don't really need it. Its just crazy that it would stay running in the background when it has no need to. So I guess poorly written apps are the only real reason to have a task manager. Either they go crazy or they chew through resources like starving animals.
[Nexus One General] Marine6680:
You may have an app that is constantly bringing itself to the foreground, or polling the cpu when your phone is idle. The more active an app is in the background the more battery is used. Some seemingly small insignificant apps can still kill your battery if they are constantly requesting run time and cpu cycles.

Try "systempanel" in the market, it can provide you with a lot of info on each programs activity and cpu use. It can provide even more info if you allow it to actively monitor for a day or two. (heck even just a few hours) You can find out which apps are the cause of your lower battery life and disable or uninstall them, unless they are needed apps; in which case they were probably excluded from the auto end function in your prior task manager anyway. I cant think of any app that I use only rarely that is also a resource hog, or at least one that I can't "turn off" within the program itself. So if you find a rarely used app that seems to use too much resources, you might need to re-evaluate if you want to keep it around. Some common silent killers are battery widgets and apps that pull data from the internet like email (but not gmail, because it uses push services and knows to only use the network when its told there is an email by the system)
[Nexus One General] Mokurex:
Re: FAQ: Why You Shouldn&#146;t Be Using a Task Killer with Android (geekfor.me)

I think the mileage will different for each person here, depending on the apps and widget they install. If your battery last longer by killing tasks then by all means, do it. If it doesn't then don't. :)
[Nexus One General] nazrin313:
Re: FAQ: Why You Shouldn&#146;t Be Using a Task Killer with Android (geekfor.me)

Update: I have decided to use my task killer again and guess what my great battery life is back! 14hours of constant use and im still at 38%...guess I will be using the task killer after all
[Nexus One General] Gr8gorilla:
The need for a task killer should be evident from a recent twit by @Cyanogen - "if you are using a task killer, do not send me your bug reports." So if you don't understand the way the android process life cycle works, and you wonder why your music player stops playing music when your screen sleeps, then think about that task killer............
[Nexus One General] krabman:
This has more to do with stupidity than task killers being bad in and of themselves. He was getting bug reports for things that stopped working after people killed the task themselves. More a commentary on users than task killers.
[Nexus One General] bmj1086:
Lol looks like somebody else knows this too. I've had that video in my signature for months now because everybody thinks they're doing so much by killing tasks because they don't want them to be running.
[Nexus One General] bobdude5:
asphalt works sooo much smoother for me when i kill all the tasks before i open it..if i dont, it jitters
[Nexus One General] RogerPodacter:
i've used system panel since it first came out, and it has always showed my active apps first, then followed by inactive (cached) apps, and then at the end it showed system processes. this was using stock ROM 2.1.

but tonight i just finally updated to froyo, and installed system panel, and now it no longer shows "inactive cached" apps in the list. it skips right over it and goes from your active apps, then all your running processes. does anyone know what i'm talking about and have you noticed this too? is this something new with how froyo handles running apps, or has the developer simply updated system panel and removed this function? i dont know because i update to froyo and then also updated system panel at the same time, so i dont know what is going on here.

that was a very useful piece of info to see and now its just gone in this superb app!
[Nexus One General] pfmiller:
This is a problem with your apps, not a fault of Androids multitasking. Android always gives apps the chance to save state before they are shut down by the system. Opera should be doing this and reopening your pages when it restarts.
[Nexus One General] RogerPodacter:
Yes I've sent this bug report to the opera developers.
[Nexus One General] drziddo:
Thank you for this info.

I'll get rid of TK.
[Nexus One General] boogieTilt:
TK

Thank you for this info, I'll give it a try goodbye TK.:cool:
[Nexus One General] Big_O:
I noticed this new N1 seems to lockup the screen when a handful of things are running and requires either a reboot or "app kill" to unfreeze the device. This is a stock AT&T phone from Google with factory rom. Is this normal? Hoping 2.2 Froyo fixes a few things.
[Nexus One General] RogerPodacter:
No that's definitely not normal. Can you give the exact circumstances that cause this?
[Nexus One General] cdtan99:
This happened to me too a couple of days after I uninstalled Taskiller. The screen sort of locked up or slowed down very noticeably. I was using CM-5.0.8-test 5 then. It happened twice. I restarted my N1 the first time it happened. The second time it happened, I opened SetCPU and noticed that the CPU was running at maximum (998mhz) and not dropping. I decided to reinstall Taskiller and kill off apps one at a time but I got impatient so I started killing several apps at a time and was not able to pinpoint which app was the culprit.

I haven't experienced this issue since then. I've had a couple of slow downs and I immediately open setcpu to check but although the cpu is at maximum, it drops immediately after.

One thing I've noticed when using a Taskiller, I don't experience any slow downs at all.

I'd like to add that both times it happened, it happened immediately while accessing the Market.
[Nexus One General] Big_O:
Noticed 2 instances of skyfire running, web browser, and a number of other apps. Memory went to like 40MB's and the secondary screen (with installed apps) wouldn't respond. Tapped it a few times and it seemed frozen. Had to do some app kills and that cleared everything up immidiately.
[Nexus One General] djmcnz:
wow, comprehensive post... :)

You do need to understand how android apps start or respond to events before you can understand the correct answer to your question I'm afraid.

"Apps" (activities) can stanrt in a numbers of ways, one of which is that you launch them from a shortcut/icon, another for example is that they can "listen" for an event and then start when that event occurs. There are also many other ways.

So, to check for malware or other sinister activity manually (i.e. without a specialised program) you'd need to check a lot of stuff. Your best bet to start is process manager that also lists services and system activities. It may not allow you to kill them, but at least you can see them.

Also, an app called Autostarts (€) on the Market will show you what apps respond to what events... a must have in my opinion.

Beyond this you'll need a little more advanced understanding. But this is a good start.
[Nexus One General] cyberchuck9000:
I used to use a task killer on my old MyTouch running 1.6, but not since. Android 2.1 and 2.2 seem to be much better at managing processes without the help of third party apps.

I use 10-11 widgets and a handful of commonly-accessed apps and I don't really have any memory or lag problems. The only time I sometimes see stuttering is when I access QuickDesk for the first time in a few hours, it seems like that gets pushed out of memory if I don't use it for a little while. Other than that, I don't have any home screen lag.

My widgets are : Digital clock, 2x News&Weather (1 News, 1 Weather, I like them separate), Music, Pandora, Calendar, RenderFX, Nexus LED flashlight, Touiteur 4x3, NewsRob

Using 3 homescreens + QuickDesk

Apps I usually have running and access frequently or work in the background: Dolphin HD, Touiteur, NewsRob, Trackball Pro, OSmonitor, ShootMe, News & Weather, etc

plus all the usual background tasks that Android always likes to run.

At least for modern Android phones, it seems task killers are obsolete.
[Nexus One General] nexusdue:
And yet battery life will differ greatly depending on the use of a task killer.

:(
[Nexus One General] cyberchuck9000:
As far as I can tell, this is usually a myth.
[Nexus One General] Paul22000:
100% Untrue.
[Nexus One General] bigmout:
In theory. In theory, communism works. In theory.

Seriously, though, I think 2.1 was a lot less efficient at managing memory than it was supposed to be. Lots of times, I experienced lag that disappeared after using a task manager to close some apps taking up lots of memory (e.g., browser).

Since 2.2, however, I haven't had to use task a manager once.
[Nexus One General] RogerPodacter:
i'm very curious how android decides what to open in the background, cause i have noticed it loads random apps once in a while, ones that i never use. but then most of the time it seems to load only the ones i frequently use. i dont use any task killer, i stick with system panel to just monitor what's going on. i've only had 2 instances where something weird happened. my phone went down to 15 mb free RAM, even though nothing out of the ordinary was open. it was like something got stuck and the system couldnt' unfreeze itself, so a reboot cleared it up. but that was 2 months ago. day to day i let the OS manage itself, and it all seems to work just fine. i'd like to know more about how it all works though.

i do notice after about a week of running without reboot, the free RAM does lower and lower, and even killing all apps doesnt bring back any free RAM. its like something uses it up and never relinquishes it. so i reboot once a week and good to go.

froyo has some significant changes over eclair it seems. froyo no longer loads any cached inactive apps anymore. it only loads running apps. for example on a fresh boot up, there is no longer an "inactive cached" apps list in system panel. i have yet to hear what or why this has changed in froyo. but i guess its for the better...
[Nexus One General] pfmiller:
Or it could just be that Android has more memory available to it in Froyo. Remember that there was no highmem support in Eclaire and so about half of the N1's memory was unused.
[Nexus One General] bohlool:
Still I think task killers do something

I agree with the post but there should be a flaw in this memory management because it happened to me dozen times that my phone slowed down and by using a task killer to kill all task, it flied again. This is not technical test but every day test shows that either this scheme doesn't work or there is a flaw in it.
[Nexus One General] khaytsus:
So, task killer = hammer. You don't use a hammer to do everything, but you keep it in the house when you need to use it.

Have you needed to use a task killer a few times for specific things, I doubt anyone will argue that. Programs can be written badly and not exit properly or other things. I also found before Froyo that sometimes the phone ran a little jerky and a task killer would improve it, primarily playing games. Haven't had to do it since Froyo, however.
[Nexus One General] djmcnz:
+1

Task killers can have a practical use. However, if everything is coded properly they are not necessary for day-to-day running.