Android Task Killers Explained: What They Do and Why You Shouldn't Use Them

[badankles]

I'll let the Mod decides to move this or not, or sticky it or not, because this is (to many) still a subjective matter.

I agree with this article and their findings, so I thought I'd share because I have noticed recently people mentioning they are using ATK on their Epic. This recent article from lifehacker explains it quite well:

Android Task Killers Explained: What They Do and Why You Shouldn't Use Them

 

[Baggy]

I'll let the Mod decides to move this or not, or sticky it or not, because this is (to many) still a subjective matter.

I agree with this article and their findings, so I thought I'd share because I have noticed recently people mentioning they are using ATK on their Epic. This recent article from lifehacker explains it quite well:

Android Task Killers Explained: What They Do and Why You Shouldn't Use Them

I went on google market and in the ratings its the best thing since sliced bread....
came on here and were told that their rubbish and not needed, I chose the latters advice.

 

[iwillfearnoevil]

wonder why sprint and samsung don't know this since they included a task killer with this phone

 

[cruiser771]

from my experience, ill notice the phone will start acting choppy with just a few widgets on my desktop and apps running. these aren't necessarily apps i'm using, they're just running in the background. i use the task killer and everything starts flowing smooth again. this is especially true with emulators. i do have an ignore list on which apps are killed. some apps just are always running and killing them only lasts for so long. unless my phone will run smooth with my widgets, ill keep using the task killer

 

[EpicFan]

That thread is bogus...I work for Best Buy Mobile and we sat two Samsung Epics next to each other, One with Advanced Task Killer the other just stock...a whole day of hourly task killing definitely helped! The phone still had about 50% charge vs. the stock phone that had already died

 

[Kelmar]

wonder why sprint and samsung don't know this since they included a task killer with this phone

Task killers aren't ALL bad, they just can cause problems if not used correctly (and all that the article refers to).

That thread is bogus...I work for Best Buy Mobile and we sat two Samsung Epics next to each other, One with Advanced Task Killer the other just stock...a whole day of hourly task killing definitely helped! The phone still had about 50% charge vs. the stock phone that had already died

I will respectfully disagree (to an extent). On my early android days I had nothing but problems with my phone. After removing ATK and letting android work properly (according to article and the site) I found that my battery life actually DOUBLED and that my phone ran smoother.


Ultimately, it's up to each user to decide if they want to use ATK or not. Personally, I've had it on my phone, but have only used it on RARE occasions.

 

[SirRicky85]

Honestly, I like my set up better with ATK + Memory Booster over Watch Dog + Program Monitor. Simply because when I run ATK + Memory Booster, I have a smooth running phone and the battery life is awesome for me.While running Watch Dog + Program Monitor makes my phone run laggy. I didn't have much time to see if Watch Dog + Program Monitor have on my battery life. Plus it seems like ATK doesn't work well with Froyo. We had Eclair long enough and this problem haven't gone out of hand until Froyo came out (I know that some apps reappear after we kill them, but that still happens in running apps and so on). I think Watch Dog is built around Froyo more than anything else and it's fairly new. I'll give everyone my thought on Watch Dog + Program Monitor on battery life once I fully charge my phone and run it for a while more. Overall I rather have my phone running smooth and not lag over a bit of battery life, since I already see a much improvement on battery life running ATK + Memory Booster.

 

[Stringyquark]

I've been using advanced task cleaner. I never let it run except to see what's running. I have alot of things ignored and use the app widget to do a "kill all but ignored" this has been working fairly well for me, but maybe I'll try watchdog as advocated in the article. Thanks

 

[GrooveRite]

I got my phone this past sunday (9/26) and the first thing I did was install ATK because thats what I had read for the previous 3 weeks that everyone had and worked. My phone was dying by 3pm so Wednesday morning, I decided to uninstall it and it actually lasted me till I got home (7pm) with some battery to spare! I'm going to keep tweaking my phone till I am happy with it, lol!

 

[iwillfearnoevil]

quite a bit of that article talks about how it's good for processes to be running in background to avoid having to restart. both the samsung built-in task killers and ATK, remove them from background. so it would have same effect. they may kill them differently, but if it's gone, it's gone and needs to restart.

 

[badankles]

quite a bit of that article talks about how it's good for processes to be running in background to avoid having to restart. both the samsung built-in task killers and ATK, remove them from background. so it would have same effect. they may kill them differently, but if it's gone, it's gone and needs to restart.

The stock task killer is android 2.1 itself. The Samsung task manager shows a list of recently started apps. You can then choose to manually end them from there. ATK can be configured to automatically kill apps, prevent apps from starting among other things. It's quite powerful and should be fully understood before using. As the article said, it's a good tool but has to be configured appropriately with the OS. With 2.1+ OS, there's not a lot of benefit using ATK.

 

[boo radley]

Here's what I'm unclear about. I understand the premise that open applications aren't really an issue: it's the CPU they're consuming.

But the Samsung Task Manager only shows me a couple of running applications, when I look at "Settings -> Applications -> Running Services" (which I assume really means 'processes'), I see a bunch of processes running, like MediaHub stuff, or SprintTV, but the associated applications aren't showing up as in Samsung's TaskManager

So how do I manage and kill these processes? (Although they seem to respawn, even if I do stop them).

 

[boomerbubba]

Here's what I'm unclear about. I understand the premise that open applications aren't really an issue: it's the CPU they're consuming.

But the Samsung Task Manager only shows me a couple of running applications, when I look at "Settings -> Applications -> Running Services" (which I assume really means 'processes'), I see a bunch of processes running, like MediaHub stuff, or SprintTV, but the associated applications aren't showing up as in Samsung's TaskManager

So how do I manage and kill these processes? (Although they seem to respawn, even if I do stop them).

In Settings -> Applications -> Running Services, press the service you want to stop. You will get a popup dialog to confirm this action.

Do this again after any reboot.

 

[boo radley]

In Settings -> Applications -> Running Services, press the service you want to stop. You will get a popup dialog to confirm this action.

Do this again after any reboot.

Thx, boomer - my question was phrased badly.
I *do* stop the service, as you describe, but those services relaunch automatically a few minutes later. So, circling back to the premise of the article if that's essentially what Task Killers do, that's WORSE than just letting them be, right? Because of the processor overhead in stopping/starting/stopping...cycle.

My second question would be, why don't things like these services (many appear from widgets) show up as running applications in the Samsung Task Manager?

And my third question is, what's the best viewer to see all of what's chomping on my cpu? Something like 'top' for unix?

It's starting to become clear to me that sooner or later I need root access to remove some of this Sprint junk.

 

[Demache]

I just use System Panel as a task manager. Its good for seeing what is consuming my RAM and end any processes that may be consuming too many resources and aren't ending correctly. But for the most part, my phone behaves quite fine without an automatic one. Sort of funny that people complain that they have lag issues without one on their 1 Ghz phones. Yet my Eris which is about 30x slower CPU-wise, doesn't have as many issues with xtrROM without any task killer.Significant lag is pretty seldom to occur now.

I rooted my friend's Eris for him, and its about as fast as his friend's stock Droid X. Now that's a feat. And the Eris had 2.2 before the Droid X too.