Task killer apps " THE TRUTH"

[Ainvar]

I have run ATM and TasKiller (pro). Of the two I prefer TasKiller Pro.

I have run the system with it for 3 days and without it for 3 days. I am a heavy data user and have about 8 email accts syncing to it. I use messaging for both sms & mms. I use Pandora all the time. I make phone calls. I stay on the phone an average of about 2-3 hours a day due to work and some personal calls.

I take pics with it and send it. Even made a 83+ meg video of my son's case being cut off.

I cant tell a difference in battery life by keeping apps killed and just letting them run.

This is a linux based OS and I have been running linux off and on as a hobby OS since mid 90's I am not a linux guru but I do know that I dont have to manage the apps that run on it like I do windows.

I do know that Android handles its resources far better than WinMo, Symbian OS, and BB (Java is just bloated anyways).

I will keep TasKiller installed but not running just to kill an app with one to clicks instead of many by going into settings and such.

Everybody will believe what they will and want and will not listen to others unless they want to. But as an avid tech geek and being in the IT world for some time and having a logical overview of technology.

I say trying to keep every little single app killed on the Android is a bit silly. You will make yourself believe that it is helping you. Even if you have all 256 megs of storage used for apps and what not I doubt you will see a huge improvement on performance.

But to each is to their own on this and enjoy your device how you want to.

 

[spectrrr]

Here is a good read about the need/lack of need to kill apps on another forum. Hope this clears some stuff up. PLEASE READ: Do NOT worry about Apps running in the Background - Droid Forum - Verizon Droid & the Motorola Droid Forum

EDIT: Skip to page 3 on that thread. The first post on that page is the meat and potatoes and explains a lot.

alright... you sold me enough to give it a try....


EDIT: only been 5 minutes, so nothing conclusive... but I did notice my window shades going MUCH faster immediately after uninstalling ATK......

 

[johnnybirdman]

and I assume at this point in the thread that everyone knows there is a task killer built into the OS already if you want to/have to kill a task?
J.

 

[spectrrr]

so then I am curious - which specific apps do you kill on occasion to improve your battery life?

I'm trying to find the happy medium between killing everything (former windows user) and killing nothing....

 

[blazingwolf]

It would be interesting to see real world battery tests on whether closing apps saves more battery life then not closing. I'm not talking about the I "feel" it saves battery test. I mean actual quantifiable testing.

I'm willing to bet that less is saved then people think.

 

[CRPercodani]

I've been using Android for about 7-8 months now and I can say for sure that using a task killer does not help, one exception is for certain app's that might have been poorly written and are using resources when they shouldn't be. Ask almost any long time G1 user about task killer apps, they will tell you it is a waste of time. You wind up doing more harm then good because Android is designed to appropriate resources to apps you are actually using, and when you leave a app it is usually sleeping in the background. Like I said there are some exceptions but really all you need to do is go to menu>settings>applications>running services and close whatever you think shouldn't be open.

 

[awboy]

My own personal experience has been that killing open apps (except for those I want to keep open) will increase the speed and responsiveness of the phone noticeably. Whenever the phone feels slow, I'll kill all apps outside of my exclusion list, and it will feel snappier immediately.

Just my personal experience

 

[koticphreak]

I mean the quantifiable results are this, after using my phone for several hours, I have about 20-30mb of Memory left and close to 20 apps running. I use advanced task killer free (which kills itself when killing other tasks). I have a few apps on the ignore list which it'll never kill, but after killing everything else I don't need running (games, soc network apps, etc), I usually end up with close to 70mb of Memory. I realize that these apps won't slow the processor down as they're not (or shouldn't be) doing much... but its RAM people... these apps are already preloaded which'll save you the 2 seconds it takes to load them up at the cost of RAM. I'm sure if I were to get down to 5mb of RAM - I would have some problems...

I can see how people not understanding the difference between ram and cpu getting confused and not grasping the effects of keeping all your apps open all the time...

On another note, the automatic task killers do slow down your phones (it's like an anti-virus, it's always doing something) so I recommend just using advanced task killer free and running it after ~2 of regular use. Those that don't use task killer apps will start to notice sluggishness as more cool apps come out and you download them. Keep in mind, that most apps today are made for lesser Android systems, once the more complex, more robust ones come out, they'll use more resources (including RAM while sitting in idle)

 

[Fazed]

I realize that these apps won't slow the processor down as they're not (or shouldn't be) doing much... but its RAM people... these apps are already preloaded which'll save you the 2 seconds it takes to load them up at the cost of RAM.

Exactly.

The entire purpose of RAM is to hold stuff for quick access. People just don't seem to realize that empty RAM is useless RAM.

The best analogy would be keeping food in your pantry for quick access. The pantry is RAM. Retrieving food from your pantry is nice and quick, but getting food to the pantry from the store (SD card or other semi-permanent storage) takes time. The optimal thing to do is to keep the pantry filled close to capacity.

Running a task killer is essentially taking the entire contents of your pantry back to the store for a refund, only to have to drive back and re-purchase your food (one meal at a time) when you're ready to eat.

 

[koticphreak]

The best analogy would be keeping food in your pantry for quick access. The pantry is RAM. Retrieving food from your pantry is nice and quick, but getting food to the pantry from the store (SD card or other semi-permanent storage) takes time. The optimal thing to do is to keep the pantry filled close to capacity.

Right, but you always want a decent amount of free space, because if you happen to go buy a few things, you have no pantry space to put it

 

[ginigma]

App/memory usage
YouTube - Androidology - Part 2 of 3 - Application Lifecycle

 

[rawness]

The best analogy would be keeping food in your pantry for quick access. The pantry is RAM. Retrieving food from your pantry is nice and quick, but getting food to the pantry from the store (SD card or other semi-permanent storage) takes time. The optimal thing to do is to keep the pantry filled close to capacity.

Running a task killer is essentially taking the entire contents of your pantry back to the store for a refund, only to have to drive back and re-purchase your food (one meal at a time) when you're ready to eat.

That's a weak analogy.

Taking things back to the store would be like uninstalling apps (we'd have to go back to the market to get those apps again). It's more like choosing to put food back in the pantry, as opposed to leaving it on the kitchen table. If I'm eating cereal, then I may keep the box next to me on the table, because I may want more. But when I'm through, and I know I'm through, I'd rather put that cereal back in the pantry. Sure, it'll take longer to go all the way to the pantry to get more cereal when I want more cereal, but if that's not going to happen until tomorrow morning, I don't want that box of cereal taking up space on my kitchen table...especially when lunch and dinner come around and I'll need to make room for the sandwiches and steaks.

I likes a clean kitchen

 

[koticphreak]

Taking things back to the store would be like uninstalling apps (we'd have to go back to the market to get those apps again). It's more like choosing to put food back in the pantry, as opposed to leaving it on the kitchen table. If I'm eating cereal, then I may keep the box next to me on the table, because I may want more. But when I'm through, and I know I'm through, I'd rather put that cereal back in the pantry. Sure, it'll take longer to go all the way to the pantry to get more cereal when I want more cereal, but if that's not going to happen until tomorrow morning, I don't want that box of cereal taking up space on my kitchen table...especially when lunch and dinner come around and I'll need to make room for the sandwiches and steaks.

I likes a clean kitchen

I agree, better analogy

 

[jlund]

All I know is that since I installed TasKiller and have shut down everything except my email and messaging during the day while I am in the office at my PC, I have extended the battery life by more than 4 hours.

In the background I had the following running:
Weather Widget
FaceBook
twitter
Camera
GPS/Maps
Uploader
Calendar
Bluetooth
WiFi
etc...

Now I can actually get the phone through an entire day (7:00 to ~10:00) on a charge...

So, OP... I not only call bullshlt, but call you pretty presumptuous for titling your thread, "The Truth"...

 

[Fazed]

If I'm eating cereal, then I may keep the box next to me on the table, because I may want more. But when I'm through, and I know I'm through, I'd rather put that cereal back in the pantry.

If I know that everything I'm going to eat for the rest of the day will comfortably fit on the table, what motivation do I have for taking the cereal back to the pantry?

Incidentally, this is also my philosophy with making my bed. Unless I'm having company over that I want to impress, I see no point in doing something that yields no benefit, and that is subsequently going to be undone.

To dispense with the analogies, the only time you benefit from killing tasks is if the RAM is so full that the OS is having to flush out old apps as you bring new ones into RAM. And even then, the time it takes you to run the task killer is probably greater than the amount of time it takes the OS to automatically swap out stale apps.

Using a task killer just seems misguided. It's a case where the solution really is worse than the (presumed) problem.

 

[billd]

The entire purpose of RAM is to hold stuff for quick access. People just don't seem to realize that empty RAM is useless RAM.

The best analogy would be keeping food in your pantry for quick access. The pantry is RAM. Retrieving food from your pantry is nice and quick, but getting food to the pantry from the store (SD card or other semi-permanent storage) takes time. The optimal thing to do is to keep the pantry filled close to capacity.

Running a task killer is essentially taking the entire contents of your pantry back to the store for a refund, only to have to drive back and re-purchase your food (one meal at a time) when you're ready to eat.

Right, but you always want a decent amount of free space, because if you happen to go buy a few things, you have no pantry space to put it

This is an important point.

When you run out of RAM in a normal UNIX/Linux system, least recently used memory from sleeping apps gets moved into swap space to make room for things that need more RAM. Code from sleeping executables can be paged out to avoid using swap but it's the same basic idea. Stacks/heaps and any other dynamic memory pages will still have to go to swap though. This is all painfully slow and should be avoided when possible. I'm not sure if Android uses a swap device. If it doesn't then when you run out, then you're just plain out. You'll need to shut some things down before you can run something else.

I think that some people are trying to over-simplify this issue. That leads to bad over-generalizing conclusions.

 

[rawness]

To dispense with the analogies, the only time you benefit from killing tasks is if the RAM is so full that the OS is having to flush out old apps as you bring new ones into RAM. And even then, the time it takes you to run the task killer is probably greater than the amount of time it takes the OS to automatically swap out stale apps.

Using a task killer just seems misguided. It's a case where the solution really is worse than the (presumed) problem.

Android apps should come with exit buttons. I like the idea of multitasking, but only if I want to multitask...I should be able to close programs that I'm not using. It's like having a computer but not being able to close out of programs.

 

[endo]

My personal favorite is all the "memory" information in most task killers. I commonly see a giant list of apps running, each using slightly over 17MB of memory. Of course if you kill one, you only get a few kilobytes back, not 17MB. Why? Because it's mostly shared memory, i.e., every single app is sharing almost all of that 17MB, most apps probably have 1-2MB of data at most. Things like the JVM code are included in that 17MB, even though only one copy of that data actually has been written to memory, and is shared amongst all applications.

If you find you're experiencing poor battery life due to running applications, find out which applications are doing it. Don't kill them, uninstall them, and send the developer a message about it. Check the battery usage application.

I do like the idea of having a task killer to stop bad/broken applications though. If the problem is a consistent one, my next step tends to be to uninstall the app though.

 

[justchilln]

My own personal experience has been that killing open apps (except for those I want to keep open) will increase the speed and responsiveness of the phone noticeably. Whenever the phone feels slow, I'll kill all apps outside of my exclusion list, and it will feel snappier immediately.

Just my personal experience

I can attest to that...

That's a weak analogy.

Taking things back to the store would be like uninstalling apps (we'd have to go back to the market to get those apps again). It's more like choosing to put food back in the pantry, as opposed to leaving it on the kitchen table. If I'm eating cereal, then I may keep the box next to me on the table, because I may want more. But when I'm through, and I know I'm through, I'd rather put that cereal back in the pantry. Sure, it'll take longer to go all the way to the pantry to get more cereal when I want more cereal, but if that's not going to happen until tomorrow morning, I don't want that box of cereal taking up space on my kitchen table...especially when lunch and dinner come around and I'll need to make room for the sandwiches and steaks.

I likes a clean kitchen

EXCELLENT ANALOGY, also you gotta hate those apps (iTap,corporate calendar I don't use,MySpace) That just magically end up on the kitchen counter even when you put them away.... I'd rather have a few second delay when starting an app as opposed to a laggy navigation due to excessive apps taking up all the RAM....

 

[syntrix]

Ive had about 5 different people tell me that Android is very similar to Linux and it uses resources differently than window, the apps show up as running but it's in stand by( not slowing down the OS),

I'm not so sure this is true. Any linux app will still have space in memory if it's open. Perhaps there's a command, like "nice" on linux, that gives it a VERY low priority so it's almost frozen.

I'd be interested in more of this memory management, especially in the server segment.

 

[syntrix]

This is an important point.

When you run out of RAM in a normal UNIX/Linux system, least recently used memory from sleeping apps gets moved into swap space to make room for things that need more RAM. Code from sleeping executables can be paged out to avoid using swap but it's the same basic idea. Stacks/heaps and any other dynamic memory pages will still have to go to swap though. This is all painfully slow and should be avoided when possible. I'm not sure if Android uses a swap device. If it doesn't then when you run out, then you're just plain out. You'll need to shut some things down before you can run something else.

I think that some people are trying to over-simplify this issue. That leads to bad over-generalizing conclusions.

See my comment above. If the app or the wrapper can do this, then it's the answer we are all in search of!

However even running apps can swap if their code is poor.

Is there a shell for the droid OS (android 2.0) yet?

 

[merrill77]

Task killer apps are not needed with android operating system.

I picked up my droid off the desk this afternoon and it was warm to touch...which has not happened to me before. The battery meter on my home screen informed me that within the past 30 minutes, battery had gone from 60% to 30%. I also noticed that the GUI was _very_ sluggish. I checked running tasks (via task mgr) and found an app (pocket auctions) was running 80% CPU. I had been using it earlier...but had moved on to something else. I tried bringing up the app and then returning back to the home screen, but that didn't help. I killed the task and everything was back to normal. For an OS without "close" buttons in the apps...I think it may, unfortunately, be necessary.

 

[Zerophi]

I've been using Android for about 7-8 months now and I can say for sure that using a task killer does not help, one exception is for certain app's that might have been poorly written and are using resources when they shouldn't be. Ask almost any long time G1 user about task killer apps, they will tell you it is a waste of time. You wind up doing more harm then good because Android is designed to appropriate resources to apps you are actually using, and when you leave a app it is usually sleeping in the background. Like I said there are some exceptions but really all you need to do is go to menu>settings>applications>running services and close whatever you think shouldn't be open.

You hit the nail on the head. Thank you

 

[lobe50]

I am on the fence w this one.....interesting topic
BTW I installed pkt eBay recently also.....will have to keep an eye on it.....

 

[Zerophi]

I picked up my droid off the desk this afternoon and it was warm to touch...which has not happened to me before. The battery meter on my home screen informed me that within the past 30 minutes, battery had gone from 60% to 30%. I also noticed that the GUI was _very_ sluggish. I checked running tasks (via task mgr) and found an app (pocket auctions) was running 80% CPU. I had been using it earlier...but had moved on to something else. I tried bringing up the app and then returning back to the home screen, but that didn't help. I killed the task and everything was back to normal. For an OS without "close" buttons in the apps...I think it may, unfortunately, be necessary.

See 2 posts above, that app should be uninstalled from you phone because it's improperly using CPU time on your phone.