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Watchdog the App killer

Just gonna tell you... as many others will tell you... setting anything to do this, ESPECIALLY with your phone running 2.2, is horrible for your phone. Not only will it shorten battery life, you'll probably end up with lots of force close messages and a slower phone.

Every time you 'kill' a process, or have something like this kill something repeatedly, the phone will just continue to re-open the process again and again and again until either you turn the app killer off, or the battery dies. One of those two is more likely going to happen if you insist on using the app killers, other wise known as 'task managers'. You don't need them on Android, because of the way it handles processes. It's linux, not windows. On Windows, having low RAM is a bad thing, and ending processes is helpful. With Android, or many linux OS platforms, having low RAM is actually quite the opposite from a windows machine. The applications are simply cached, and not actively using CPU cycles (using the processor actively). Most task killers only provide readings on RAM, falsely leading users to believe that more RAM = more speed. Not always true. You can get lucky blindly killing apps with high memory usage, that were really still using the CPU, but you're not always going to get that lucky.

Get something like system panel to check CPU usage, versus just RAM readings. It also provides monitoring services to track battery use of applications, total CPU time used by an application while it was 'open' (actively being used), among other beneficial things.

Just going to say, ATK (advanced task killer), or stuff like this (watchdog) is just bad news all across the board for your phone.
The Evo has PLENTY of RAM to spare, and PLENTY of raw processing power so that it shouldn't lag at all, even if you're using a ton of things. Hell, I use power amp, play emulators, and have music torrenting from music junk all the while, and have not a single FPS drop in street fighter 2... or any other genesis game or whatever emulator I'm using.
If you get lag from just using the phone, there's a very good chance there's a rogue app that doesn't ever sleep and just sits active until it's actually killed off. This is where something like system panel will come in handy, because you'll know what was causing the problem, instead of just hitting 'kill all'.



It's late, I think I'm rambling. You get what I'm saying. Get system panel, drop plain task killers, enjoy your phone as intended.

Something to think on:
If an automatic task killer was needed, don't you think they'd put one ON the phone? 2.2 has it's own process manager in settings to end specific processes, if need be by default. No third party applications to pointlessly kill tasks needed.
 
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And, the point of Watchdog is to let you track down troublesome apps so you can just get rid of them (or be aware of them), without resorting to randomly or systematically killing apps and processes. Have a read of the instructions!

Subluka I agree with you. From the reviews of Watchdog, it's best used to ID apps that consume CPU cycles. It's the apps using CPU time that consume power, not an inactive app sitting in the background.

There are some good apps that are poorly written in that they continue CPU use. I've tried explaining this to a friend of mine but they are determined to install an app/task killer. Even when I had them install Watchdog and the most active app was Android System! My friend still wanted to kill all of the other apps that showed zero cpu uses.

Long story shortened - they installed a task killer, killed a bunch of active apps, only to have them reopened again. Result after a couple of hours of this vicious cycle - nearly dead battery!!!!:rolleyes:
 
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I use Watchdog exclusively to alert me to high CPU usage. A few times my music player or TuneIn were the culprits, but I didn't kill those upon alert but just let them run a little longer and they went back to normal.

There was one app (can't remember which) that made WD go crazy a few times. I just uninstalled that altogether and didn't miss it.

On the other hand, I don't like System Panel as much and had to uninstall it as it was lagging my phone a lot. The info was useful, but for me, almost too much info.

Watchdog was much simpler for my little brain to get around :)
 
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I'm a little less than a week into owning an Android (Incredible), and while I knew from reviews that battery life was minimal, I really didn't expect what I got. So I purchased an extended battery, which I charged fully upon receipt. It drained as quickly as the standard battery did. So I have uninstalled Advanced Task Killer and Battery Left Widget hoping that will make a difference. Having been a Windows Mobile user, and then a BlackBerry user, an task killer made sense. But I'm learning that with Android, many things I'm used to are completely different with this OS and the same assumptions don't necessarily apply.

I love the phone. Just trying to get used to the ways in which it is quite different from other mobile platforms.
 
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