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Putting to rest the myths about Task Killers/RAM Optimizers and the like

Funny,

I have had a few Android Smart Phones and one of the first things that I learned from the various forums that I frequent is that you don't need a task killer on Android. In addition my son in law who is a computer genius explained in easier for me terms than EarlyMon did here. You see I am bald and on Medicare so I need someone to make things easy to understand for me. By the way EarlyMon thanks much for your efforts to explain why task killers are as you call it "snake oil".

But one more thing about task killers that just amazes me and had me laughing. I got a Galaxy Note 4 not quite a month ago from Verizon Wireless. Wouldn't you know I had not been using it for more than half an hour and this notification pops up about using too much ram and that it needed cleaned up or as the app called it "boost". Of course the best way to take care of my problem was to use the absolutely free, absolutely bloatware, absolutely snake oil, app called Clean Sweep that Verizon Wireless had thoughtfully included in the apps that I have on my new phone.

I just let it there for about 10 days when I finally got tired of all the notifications to "boost" my ram and offers to buy other garbage resource and power hogging apps. Of course I did uninstall the offending app. Now to go to the Verizon store and quiz the sales rep on why I need a task killer, just to see what he/she says about it. I will also have with me a business card or some sort of paper with the url to this thread for that person to read and learn from EarlyMon.
 
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I am opposed to task killers but i still have this 'issue' with Android killing every app i prefer to keep open whenever it 'thinks' i'm running out of memory. EM maybe you can detail the answer for me as i can't grasp the concept, but, if 'unused RAM is wasted RAM' why can't i use that last 80MB that seems to be the threshold where the OOM process starts killing apps, including my launcher? why is that last 80MB inaccessible and now seemingly, 'wasted?' keep in mind this involves stock Android or light skins, not TouchWiz, which has its own way of doing things and gives far more control to the user and is partially why i prefer Samsung but i do wonder why that last bit of RAM can't be used? that last 80MB free is when i notice system services and even user apps listed as 'restarting' in the running section of the application manager and probably attributes to 99% of 'android lag' complaints, often blamed on 'low RAM' when in fact it's just apps reloading over and over due to the OOM killer assuming, rather incorrectly, that the device is critically low on memory.

In theory, in Linux (which Android is based) you could use up all the available RAM to the point 0MB is left, and all you'd get is an app or so crashing because it needed more than is available. there should not be any reason for Google to force apps to close when you get to a set threshold of memory free. i've even practiced this by deleting the OOM killer on a rooted Note 3 running an AOSP ROM and could get to 2MB left without any issues, while Google's approach had apps shutting down or getting 'cached' at around 100MB left.

I'm not against things running and using the RAM, i'm against them being shut down when it gets to a certain usage level, which i feel is largely unnecessary. it's very hard to use up all the RAM in a Note 3, even with a few dozen games. yet Google's way is needlessly closing things it shouldn't need to, when no less than half the RAM is used! This seems to counter the argument about task killers and this myth of needing free RAM.
 
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Some RAM is left empty due to the dynamic nature of RAM usage. If it were completely full, every time a little RAM is needed to load a webpage or copy a file, time, CPU cycles and power would be wasted unloading and reloading RAM. IOW unused RAM is wasted RAM, but within reasonable limits to ensure the most efficient operation.
 
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is not allowing the use of 1.5GB of the Note 3's RAM 'within reaonable limits?' or is it more like not taking advantage of the amount the device has available? i think some limits are necessary to prevent crashes, but on more current higher spec devices, it seems a might extreme. I've noticed lag and CPU cycles happening when tons of services/apps are restarting due to the OOM process going rampant because it doesn't like more than half the RAM used, which seems to cause more harm than good.
 
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See my post here -

http://androidforums.com/threads/pu...izers-and-the-like.896663/page-2#post-6860101

Look at the three pictures.

The idea that I had 200 MB free, agreed to by two different views, was purely notional.

The third picture revealed what the kernel knew at that same time - just over 80 MB free.

Furthermore, the out of memory killer isn't unique to Android and I doubt that anyone here has run Linux for years without it.

It's fundamental to the Linux kernel.

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/11/30/linux-out-of-memory.html

The reason that you may think that your desktop Linux doesn't have this is because you're overlooking that a desktop implementation includes a virtual memory swap on disk.

Android does not.

And unlike Windows, Linux doesn't optimize 1 to 1 for solid state memory and swap - on Linux, it can be larger, much much larger.

OS X, another Unix, not dissimilar either. Its kernel grows virtual memory dynamically, preferring to grow VM immensely at a large speed penalty before throwing in the towel and resorting to task killing.

Few Linux apps just crash - they're usually assassinated by the kernel.

Android did not invent the concept or the mechanism, it inherited it.

Exactly why I said - we don't believe that desktop Linux needs fixing, but too many believe that Android does.

Hope that clears things up.

PS to @DemDog - Sorry about that, no idea why balding and Medicare make me hard to understand. My son-in-law is a medical genius and he didn't know either. Hope you get well soon. Don't beat up store reps, they're required to do what their masters tell them. To do other would be like handing a Cordon bleu recipe to the cashier at McDonald's and taking their time to explain why the burgers suck.
 
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Great explanation as always EM. That being said, i get annoyed when my email app is closed behind my back when nothing needs more memory. on TouchWiz, that doesn't happen. on stock Android however, 'tab discarding' as is the case with the Chrome browser is not only non-user-controllable, but is even remarked as a 'feature'. I see that one thing as a large inconvenience and defeating the point of tabbed browsing since it interrupts the workflow of resuming a website i was reading prior, and reloads it and goes back to the beginning. On the go, this even impacts data usage. when you got eight tabs discarding and reloading over a limited 4G data plan, this adds up fast. you can install Firefox for Android and use about:config to stop this, but why not Chrome or any other browser?

Launcher redraws are very annoying, and still a problem with Lollipop. apparently the Android OOM killer (or whatever it's actually called--i don't know a better term for it) assumes the launcher is an app instead of something vital (like system UI) and sets the kill priority to level 6 (core functions like a foreground application or system UI, the like are set to level 0--aka persistent, non-killable, etc) so what happens is you open a small app like your SMS app and exit out of it by hitting home or back and the launcher is gone, and reloads. it breaks the smoothness. there has to be some way to make apps selectable as persistent to avoid this annoying 'feature' which is 90% the time incorrect and unnecessary.

TouchWiz-specific apps (those i use) have persistent states. the task manager (a revamped variant of recent apps) isn't a killer. it lists compatible apps and offers a kill function if one misbehaves (currently never had to use that and the thing only lists apps from Samsung and a couple of services) but most TW apps don't get shut down and some even offer exit functions for the foreground component. others use home button action to minimize, and back button action to close. in my view, this works extremely well. the stock Samsung browser follows this too. no tab discarding.
 
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They've done nothing magical, just prioritized their apps for the system control.

You used to be able to do that yourself prior to 4.0 but pretty soon everyone who didn't understand wound all of their apps up to high priority, basically making their phones useless, and then complaining that it was Google's or the makers' fault.

So they changed the mechanism and this is why we can't have nice things.

You can call it the OOM killer, that's its basic name.

There is another prioritization that takes place in your Java framework (unless you're using ART and I haven't bothered to see where they've put it for that) and that's more likely what you're impressed with on your Samsung.

There is actually a genius solution that works up through Jellybean so you could completely tune that yourself if rooted.

Not compatible with all OEM overlays but can be incorporated into a custom rom (and very often has been - I used to keep 16 browser tabs open without redraws and a number of other apps running full tilt without anything closing on a 1 GB phone with it on ICS and without settings the OOM minfree values insanely small) -

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=16635544#post16635544

I don't know if a later version exists for KitKat or Lollipop.
 
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Has anyone actually rooted Lollipop yet? I haven't really done a proper test of ART vs. Dalvik other than noticing the former being smoother overall, but at least on my Nexus 10, i get the reloading issue and tab discarding issue (launcher redraws with Google Home also) more often than i did in KitKat. it chokes after three apps are minimized. But of course, most Google apps got Material updates with that version as well and i noticed tons of them continue to run even after i 'close' them (Play Music is notorious for this). That might be the 'root' issue.

What i did in old Android versions (2.3 and under) was edit 'minfree' values so low that the OOM killer couldn't really kill anything unless it had like less than 2MB left. with those devices at the time it was the only means to keep it on par with iOS level smoothness. This was done via ROM Toolbox Pro.

I know you can do pretty much anything with Firefox for Android as you can for Desktop. the about:config is present and tab discarding is easy to disable. as for Chrome, no such option exists. even the secret menu (says 'warning these settings may bite') don't solve tab discarding. test it youself. open as few as four tabs on Chrome and a website for each. load a blog on one, scroll to the comments (i like reading comments on blogs, hilarious stuff) and then hit the home icon or button. open Google Play Store. install or update an app. open recents, and select Chrome. all tabs reload. you lose the place on the blog site and it jumps straight back to top.

Now, AOSP browser (stock browser on Android 4.1 and 4.0) does this too. not sure why, but Samsung's adaptation of that browser doesn't seem to do this, and offers other features as well.
 
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I don't intend to believe an app identified as snake oil and go from there.

Instead, I'm going to leave you with the following. What you do with the information is your business.


http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Negative_proof

We can't seem to establish for you that the Battery Doctor is snake oil - therefore you believe what it tells you.

I could go into the details of teaching process monitoring in Android but you can do that yourself by googling "man ps" and "man top" to get the Linux user manual pages' definition, then run those commands in Terminal Emulator and send the output to a file for your forensic study.

Then you'll going to see all of the helper processes that Android is running and I suspect that at that point, we're going to be in to a full lesson on how *nix operating systems work.

We'll be well past your firsthand discovery that you were told the truth in the first place - that the app in question is a bunch of bullshit - and on to operating system theory. I took years to learn it properly.

We don't have time for all that so I've selected some high points.

Apps in Android run with intents.

Yes. Sometimes when you wake up one app - like your contacts - a signal occurs that triggers other apps - like the dialer or or your sms app - to get on deck so you don't have to wait for a cold launch.

Those signals are called intents. They're tightly managed and well controlled.

And outside of you tapping the screen or the foreground app calling for a background service, it's the only way that Android wakes up and runs things. (Apart from things like email that sleep, wake up to sync, sleep, wake up to sync, etc etc.)

Unless you're the geniuses at Battery Doctor who have discovered that omg pwnies, a camera can wake up 20 foreground apps and processes and omg only Battery Doctor can save you.

So rather than me continue to bicker about this, how about you look at each of those 20 apps and figure out how you can access each one from the camera.

The alternative to Battery Doctor NOT being snake oil lies in the proof that the many hundreds of man-years of system design and development leading to how Android works is just all nonsense.

http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/AndroidIntent/article.html

https://developer.android.com/tools/debugging/debugging-memory.html

https://developer.android.com/training/articles/memory.html

And after you've digested that, discover that Android already has a very sophisticated task killer whose collective developers make the creators of snake oil apps appear to be the brain damaged monkeys that they are -

http://ajqi.com/android-memory-management-and-its-effects-on-multi-tasking/

But if you want to believe that Battery Doctor is killing 20 apps every time you launch your camera, great. Run it. Let it screw with the entire operating system. Why not.

And the next time you believe what the snake oil tells you, just remember that you were warned -

That crap is like drugs. The more you use it, the more you need to.

All the while being convinced that it's a good thing.

Oddly, we don't download and use task killers on desktop Linux. Somehow, we all believe that the operating system works.

But not when you put it on a phone. Gosh no. /sarcasm


You want to believe what Battery Doctor is telling you - fine, great. Run it. It's screwing with the operating system and convincing you that the operating system doesn't actually work but if you like it, run it.

edit/ps - I have a habit of oversimplifying intents. Scary alien has a habit of posting and explaining it properly and I appreciate that very much.

Droid-den had a great write-up on this, but evidently, the site is down or le3ky ended it.

This needs to be a sticky. I'm brand new from IO S, and this post address my questions and concerns about my new phone brilliantly. Cheers!
 
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I know its off-topic Early Mon but I just wanted to say thanks for your information, amusing narrative tendencies, and helpfulness. Your explanations of Android memory management helped me clear some things up for friends and family, and reading your responses to people helped me fix my gfs One M8, and get the bootloader unlocked and Venom installed with everything still just the way she likes it. Havent had to ask you any questions yet because you answered them in other member's threads, but im starting to follow your posts just for pure knowledge and entertainment purposes. Cheers M8
 
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I want to uninstall clean master but cannot do it. I have gone to google play store and hit uninstall. Hit settings and gone to application manager and hit uninstall. Nothing works. It appears as though it's uninstalling - the bar runs and runs but it's still there. I was able to uninstall battery doctor in the normal way. This is scaring me that I can't uninstall clean sweep. Researched it online and tried various suggestions without success. Any suggestions?
 
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It is clean master. No my device had not been rooted.
I've checked and can't find another case like yours. :(

What phone do you have?

Depending on the model, a factory data reset may be in order.

Not all malware can be detected, only that which is known.

Not being able to uninstall Clean Master sounds insidious.
 
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I could think of a few things here. Of course the obvious concern for malware. But it could also be a failed uninstall that won't let it proceed. If something got corrupted in the process. Or, a locked SD card could prevent it, too. Finally, but not likely, if Clean Master came as preinstalled app. I've never heard of that, but some of these fringe carriers will load up crap.
 
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I could think of a few things here. Of course the obvious concern for malware. But it could also be a failed uninstall that won't let it proceed. If something got corrupted in the process. Or, a locked SD card could prevent it, too. Finally, but not likely, if Clean Master came as preinstalled app. I've never heard of that, but some of these fringe carriers will load up crap.
I worry about that last part as well.

I don't know how you'd determine that without either rooting or a factory data reset.

I guess in addition to asking for the model, we also have to ask - what carrier?
 
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