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Help How many processes should be running?

ayrshiredude

Well-Known Member
Mar 16, 2010
167
7
Ok I have advanced task killer on my phone but am amazed at the numbers of processes it seems to kill. I have the ones I know I need set not to close down like adw launcher the HTC keyboard etc however it regularly reports its closed down 40 + processes when I run it. The I run it a few moments later, not having launched anything, and it reports shutting down another 20 or so.

Is this right? Could this be the cause of the lagging? I am currently running JM5 firmware which seemed amazing to start with but now seems as laggy as it was before.
 
Let me offer you a piece of advice:

STOP

USING

TASK

KILLERS.


This ain't a WinMo phone.

This ain't a G1 Android from 2008.

You don't need to run one, EVER, with a Galaxy or pretty much any Android 2.1 device.

If you need to kill a particular badly behaved task, you can do it with the stock Android applications management.

All those processes you see running? Less than a dozen are actually running, the rest are cached and using minimal resources, ready to run next time you need them. If Android needs the resources those cached programs are using, IT will kill them.

Automated task killers **** YOU UP. Just walk away from them.

The big culprit of lag on a Galaxy S is the file system, and there are fixes for that aplenty (go take a peek on XDA's I9000M development section).
 
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I find task killers very useful as the more apps and processes that are loaded into memory the more my phone lags.

If the facebook app is in memory, the phone takes a good minute or so to do anything other than text input.

I agree the automation is needless as it's easy enough to kill what's causing problems.

Without the ability to easily kill tasks my phone would be unusable, so I would argue that task killers are, infact, essential for Galaxy S owners.

As for the built in task management in TouchWiz - it's unfriendly, displays the process names rather than the friendly app names, requires you to navigate through menus to get to it as you can't make a shortcut on the home screen, requires three clicks to end a task and doesn't support killing of multiple processes at once.

Also,

WHAT'S

WITH

THE

ALLCAPS?
 
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Be careful. You are treading on hollow ground here.

I have no idea what incited this flame war, but it's been ongoing for a very very long time. Try not to get caught in it.

I am going to list the pros and cons of using a task killer:

Cons
The Android system can automatically optimizes system memory. Apps that are used often are stored in the memory in order to allow quick access to them, hence reducing load time. Therefore, killing apps unnecessarily increases load time.
Continuously loading and dumping memory takes up a lot of battery power, something that no phone user would like.
Inexperienced user often kill all apps without even understanding what each app is for. Some of the apps are core tasks which have to keep running at all times. Turning them off simply forces Android to reload them again instantly, slowing things down and draining your battery.

Pros
Killing off unnecessary task that doesn't automatically quits after leaving the app, like Games. Frankly, I don't see any reason why gaming apps should stay in the memory. I am not going to be launching games repetitively.
Killing off apps that crashed, but somehow also fails to force close itself.

In conclusion: Like all good things, use task killer sparingly. Only kill apps that you won't be using again in the next few hours, or apps that have crashed.
 
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That was helpful. Thanks. I'm looking right now and see things like Amazon MP3, Visual Voicemail and YouTube along with 12 other apps running. I have never even opened Amazon or Visual VM before. I also just switched from WinMo, so the task killer is something I'm used to. I'm learning a lot about Android though. Threads like this are a great help. Thanks to all who have posted!
 
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