• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Help ATK: Not as bad as you think.

HalfFrozen

Android Enthusiast
Apr 23, 2010
638
48
AZ
Advanced Task Killer has been greatly frowned upon by many DX users, while I was with them at first, I quickly changed sides on the whole argument about bad and good, to the 'good' side.

My battery was noticbly starting to run out with in 4-6 hours the last few days or so under very minimal usage. But after awhile of hearing how bad ATK is I just wanted to actually make it official and stand behind my reasoning for it being bad for the DX with a supposedly built in task killer.

I DL'd it yesterday morning while the phone was still plugged in to get a full charge for the day. And set it up how it was on my Droid, and I will just say this... My phone from yesterday mornings charge is just now hitting 20% after heavy usage every other hour for anywhere from 30mins to an hour of constant usage one he internet and playing games. I did this as a test for a kinda decent review.

And I will just say this, I am now with the people who like ATK on their DX, it has greatly changed my batteries life duration.

Just wanted to share my opinion with everyone about the ATK debate, and my findings.
 
Advanced Task Killer has been greatly frowned upon by many DX users, while I was with them at first, I quickly changed sides on the whole argument about bad and good, to the 'good' side.

My battery was noticbly starting to run out with in 4-6 hours the last few days or so under very minimal usage. But after awhile of hearing how bad ATK is I just wanted to actually make it official and stand behind my reasoning for it being bad for the DX with a supposedly built in task killer.

I DL'd it yesterday morning while the phone was still plugged in to get a full charge for the day. And set it up how it was on my Droid, and I will just say this... My phone from yesterday mornings charge is just now hitting 20% after heavy usage every other hour for anywhere from 30mins to an hour of constant usage one he internet and playing games. I did this as a test for a kinda decent review.

And I will just say this, I am now with the people who like ATK on their DX, it has greatly changed my batteries life duration.

Just wanted to share my opinion with everyone about the ATK debate, and my findings.

Same here, I thought ATK wasn't all the good and that it didn't and wouldn't help my battery, but after getting less than a day of hardly any use on a full battery charge, I tried ATK another time. Closing most apps but a select few (Texts, ATK, BatteryTimeLite, and about 2 more) has worked wonders. Charged yesterday to full by 10pm and is now (10pm again) just hitting 10% left. Used it alot today as well. ATK FCing apps while the screen is off is ftw.
 
Upvote 0
I'll try to explain the whole task killer conundrum so hopefully people will understand it better.

Does anyone know what caching is? Did you guys know that Windows 7 completely fills up your ram with applications even if you didn't open them? The idea is that an application that is already loaded will open and run much faster when you decide to actually use it and it works extremely well. If another program needs the resources then Windows will close applications to make room automatically. This is all completely transparent to the user. Android does the exact same thing. The only difference is Windows 7 does not tell you that it does this while Android has a spot that says "running processes" and people see it and flip out because their old PC managing instincts kick in. These instincts were correct for older Windows machines, but they do more harm than good when trying to apply them to Android.

In Android, applications have a sleep mode where they sit in memory and consume zero CPU and zero battery. If you decide to open one of these programs, they will open very fast. It takes MORE battery to manually close an application and then load it up later than it does to leave it alone in sleep mode.

If an application that is running needs more memory than is freely available, Android will automatically close one or more of the least used applications in sleep mode to free up some space.

I'll repeat, manually closing an application that does not need to be closed wastes battery. Android will also try to put stuff in your ram to maximize caching. Empty ram is wasted ram. Android and your task killer may open and close apps continuously and this will drain some juice.

A quick refresher on how to close apps in Android: If you press Home, your app is still running full on. You only press Home to leave an app if you intend to multitask and want to get back to it later. The first way you should try to exit an app is to see if the app has a built in exit or quit button. If it does, use that. If the app does not, exit the app using the back button. I'll repeat: If you try to exit an app using the Home button, the app will continue to use resources since you merely told it to "minimize".

If a task killer appears to give you a benefit, it's because and ONLY because you have a poorly coded app installed somewhere that is consuming resources when it is not supposed to(An app whose sleep mode does not actually sleep). There is no other scenario where a task killer will give you a boost in battery life.

Due to the openness of the Android Market, half baked applications have no difficulty getting onto the Market. It's up to the end user to carefully look over their applications and decide if they are any good or not. Don't expect everything you install to be perfect. There are very minimal requirements for an app to get onto the Market.

My advice is to figure out what the culprit is and get rid of it instead of using a task killer.
 
Upvote 0
If your battery doesn't last more than a few hours, you most likely have a hung process and that is why the task killer is helping you. I use osmonitor and have it setup to display in the notification bar. If the little graph is full green and I'm not doing anything, I check it and it tells me what is using the processor right then and I use the task killer built into it to only close that task.

If you use an auto task killer or one that ends many tasks, the tasks just reload anyway and consume battery life. Ending a single offending task is best.
This is VERY true, nice job sir.
For others, just because you noticed an increase in battery life after ATK, doesn't mean it was ATK that helped you. It could be other things that helped your battery life.
I just hope Google adds some kind of approval process that checks for memory leakage and proper closing of the application to get rid of all the rogue apps.
 
Upvote 0
what are you guys doing on your droid to kill the battery that fast?

i take it off the charger at 7am. went to bed at 1am and i was at 40% still. i only used it for light browsing and a medium amount of texting. i have my profile set to battery saver mode.

For me i guess its just a matter of realizing when i use the phone more than days when i dont use it much. Yesterday i had the same experience as you... off the charger at 830ish and then went to bed around 2am and when i plugged it into the charger it said 40% and charging, but i didnt really use my phone, to what i consider, a lot.

I just hear people saying they use it "a lot" and have it on smart mode and have email syncing and facebook running, and they still get great battery life..... where i have most things like that turned off so that i can make it a full day on a charge.....
 
Upvote 0
Would you explain that further? I haven't seen 100% RAM usage on my Windows 7 machine ever. What you said makes it sound like I should see 100% usage all the time.

Open your task manager and go to the performance tab. Look where it says Physical Memory. You'll see several sections: Total(how much ram you have installed), Cached(How much ram is taken up for caching), Available(How much ram you have available for a foreground app to use, this considers cached memory to be available as well because it is ready to be purged at any time), and Free(how much ram you have that isn't used by anything). Windows 7 tries to make the Free amount as close to 0 as possible. If it isn't 0, that means that all of your commonly used applications combined still don't use up all of your available RAM.
 
Upvote 0
Advanced Task Killer has been greatly frowned upon by many DX users, while I was with them at first, I quickly changed sides on the whole argument about bad and good, to the 'good' side.

My battery was noticbly starting to run out with in 4-6 hours the last few days or so under very minimal usage. But after awhile of hearing how bad ATK is I just wanted to actually make it official and stand behind my reasoning for it being bad for the DX with a supposedly built in task killer.

I DL'd it yesterday morning while the phone was still plugged in to get a full charge for the day. And set it up how it was on my Droid, and I will just say this... My phone from yesterday mornings charge is just now hitting 20% after heavy usage every other hour for anywhere from 30mins to an hour of constant usage one he internet and playing games. I did this as a test for a kinda decent review.

And I will just say this, I am now with the people who like ATK on their DX, it has greatly changed my batteries life duration.

Just wanted to share my opinion with everyone about the ATK debate, and my findings.

You're simply hiding the real problem. Something is messing up your battery usage and all your doing is killing it along with many others that are running perfectly fine.

Task killers are for people that can't be bothered to find the real problem.
 
Upvote 0

BEST TECH IN 2023

We've been tracking upcoming products and ranking the best tech since 2007. Thanks for trusting our opinion: we get rewarded through affiliate links that earn us a commission and we invite you to learn more about us.

Smartphones