

Reddit: I stopped using a task killer to see if there's a difference. It's huge. - moultano
http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/cwhm6/i_stopped_using_a_task_killer_last_week_to_see_if/

======
generalk
This is what I've always told folks who ask about my Nexus One's need for a
task killer: "Never used one, no need." On the rare occasion that you _do_
find an app that backgrounds incorrectly, uninstall it like any other buggy
app. Everything else Just Works.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
How do you identify the buggy app? My wife's Nexus One seems to be exhibiting
the symptoms but obviously I don't get to observe it in general use to give me
some intuition on what's causing the issue.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Settings -> About phone -> Battery use

This gives you an excellent display of what hardware and software components
have used the most of your battery power. Take a look at the applications
using the most battery, and you can either find apps that have inefficient
background processes, or apps that are set to update their data too
frequently.

Edit: My current list: Display 41%, Cell Standby 28%, Phone idle 25%, Wi-Fi
8%; Everything else: peanuts.

------
aphyr
Sadly, Verizon insists that a task killer is essential to maintain free
memory. I've tried to convince them otherwise--watching the ADB logs should be
sufficient to conclude that the memory manager is doing its job just fine--but
no luck. I _do_ keep white killer around for debugging my own lock-prone
services, but I can't say I've ever needed it for a published app.

~~~
Qz
The pursuit of 'free memory' is one of those things that make me laugh, same
as people complaining about programs that are CPU hogs.

I mean, we're always after the best memory and the best CPU's only to end up
running around feverishly making sure we use as little of it as possible.

~~~
moultano
I think the motivation for this comes from people's personal experience with
disk thrashing. On a desktop, getting to 100% memory usage _is_ a big deal,
because it means you're already using a lot of swap.

They just haven't relearned their habits for systems without a platter.

~~~
masklinn
> On a desktop, getting to 100% memory usage is a big deal, because it means
> you're already using a lot of swap.

But that's not even true for any OS more modern than Windows XP. Linux, Vista,
7 and OSX all keep huge amounts of data cached when you don't need the memory,
just because they can and it's more efficient to restart stuff pulling half of
it from RAM than re-reading everything from disk.

My macbook currently shows 2.27GB Free out of 8GB RAM, but 2.27GB of those are
marked as Inactive (they're cache holding old data which might yet be needed
again), yielding a total of 5.73GB in active use. The rest can be reclaimed
and reused at a moment's notice if need be.

~~~
moultano
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP>

_As of the end of June 2010, Windows XP is the most widely used operating
system in the world with a 54.6% market share, having peaked at 76.1% in
January 2007._

~~~
masklinn
And your point is?

~~~
Qz
That most people still have to worry about disk thrashing obviously.

------
peng
From the title, I thought this was going to be about blocking Reddit to
improve productivity.

~~~
emehrkay
I get a lot of work done when reddit goes down. Happened today with the read-
only mode -- who wants to do that?

~~~
code_duck
I simply added

127.0.0.1 reddit.com www.reddit.com

to my /etc/hosts on the machines I use for working.

~~~
m_eiman
I'm not sure that spending your time on HN instead is much of an improvement.

~~~
plorkyeran
At least it's lower volume.

~~~
pilif
and more worthy of your time due to being higher quality (this post excluded)

------
seldo
I'm not trying to be an Apple fanboy here, but this is sort of an interesting
example of what happens when you give your users more information about the
system than they need. People see these stats and make incorrect assumptions
about what they mean. iPhone on the other hand doesn't give you this
information, so people ignore it, which works out fine.

~~~
Ysx
Android doesn't show this as standard. You need a third-party app to show
memory usage or kill processes.

~~~
varikin
You can kill processes with standard Android, but it is buried under the
system settings under applications or something like that. I don't know about
memory usage though.

------
starnix17
The sad thing about task killers is how many "normal" people will end up using
them because some salesperson for carrier X has told them to do so.

Go to a Verizon store and look at their Android phones, I bet most of them
have a task killer running.

~~~
timtadh
So true, I only installed one because it was one of the demo apps the CSR
installed on my phone to explain how the app store works. I used it
occasionally and then realized it was pointless.

------
axod
I wonder how many install anti-virus apps. You could probably make a fair bit
selling anti-virus/firewall/anti-spyware apps for the uneducated.

I have a N1 and have never seen the need for a task killer. Quite odd that
people would install one.

------
Locke1689
I'm sorry, and I don't mean to whine, but I don't think this is really HN
material. Pretty much everyone who's used a spinlock instead of a semaphore
knows that a context switch can be more expensive than the alternatives. For a
nontechnical audience (Reddit, nowadays), this may be original, but I hope
it's not so revolutionary for most of us.

------
jsz0
I have the completely opposite experience on my HTC Eris. If I don't use a
task killer I get lag problems (especially with dialer delay) It becomes
unbearable after a couple of days. Everything is perfect a few seconds after a
trip to ATK. I'm not sure if this is a resource management problem or just a
bug in the HTC Sense apps.

~~~
pbz
Up until Froyo (2.2) I had to kill tasks every now and then (or simply reboot)
because it was slowing down to a crawl. All the animations were getting
choppy, took a lot longer for applications to start, and so on. I guess they
fixed or tweaked something in 2.2 because for the past moth I didn't have to
kill anything yet; I have the same apps as before. Unfortunately they also
broke some stuff in FRF91 (oddly enough FRF83 was better / more stable for
me...)

------
Indyan
I use a task killer as not all apps are that obedient. The gameloft games
won't die when running in background. They continue to consume a whole lot of
resources. Ideally we shouldn't need a task killer. Unfortunately, real world
has lots of clumsy programmers.

------
eli
Reminds me of John C Dvorak complaining that Windows' "Idle Process" was
eating up all his CPU time. Sometimes a little information is dangerous.

~~~
pilif
This in turn reminds me of an april fools joke in the german c't magazine
where they've shown this software of theirs that puts an end to the huge CPU
load of the idle process.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't seem to be available online.

------
snprbob86
As an iPhone owner: I have no idea what a "task killer" is or why I would even
consider using one...

I'm a supporter of Android (I know many happy Android owners), but this post
screams to me "Apple does the things they do for good reasons".

EDIT: Sheesh. I had read the article. I was referring to keeping these sorts
of things out of the app store. I'm familiar with the task model of the
Android SDK and understand that this isn't a problem with Android, it is a
problem with the open ecosystem. Open ecosystems are a good thing sometimes,
and they are a bad thing sometimes.

~~~
troygoode
I'm a long time iPhone owner (just upgraded to 4 from my 3G two weeks ago) and
just received a Droid X on Friday through work (my first Android phone); I'll
be carrying both for the foreseeable future. I'm digging various aspects of
the Droid, but WOW is it easy to end up with a ton of processes running on the
thing - and it is very annoying to have to go over to my task killer
frequently to shut them down. According to this article I've been "doing it
wrong," so I'll let them all run freely for a while and see what is what.

At the moment I think I prefer iOS 4's version of "almost-multitasking-
sometimes", but we'll see how I feel after I get used to the 'droid way of
doing things.

~~~
moultano
The point of this is that you don't need to shut them down. The android system
does that for you.

The idea of processes consuming resources is a mental model people developed
on desktop OS's that they need to shed for Android. When each process is
assumed to correctly serialize its state and can be killed at any time without
consequence, the OS can keep the system perfectly snappy without the user
having to worry about it.

This is a user education problem, not a technical problem. This is why android
doesn't make it easy to see what processes are actually running.

~~~
troygoode
I'll agree that it is a user education problem if that is the case. The first
thing every Android user told me after I told them I was getting the Droid X
was "download Advanced Task Killer." _Every single one._ I'm certainly willing
to adjust my use now that I know I'm using the phone improperly, but this is
by no means something that I was alone in being mistaken about. (Also not sure
why I deserved a downvote for what appears to be a popular mistake.)

~~~
1053r
My own personal experience agrees with the need for Advanced Task Killer. When
I leave my nexus one alone for a few days, it inevitably starts to slow down
(sometime pausing for as much as 10 seconds totally locked up). I'll open adk,
and see that I have 40M of free memory. I kill everything, and the phone is
instantly snappy and quick again.

It doesn't need doing as often as on my old G1, but it needs it. I don't know
if that is because I am running cyanogen mod (5.0.8, which is based on 2.1) or
what, but you can pry adk out of my cold dead hands. Maybe I have some buggy
apps. But adk makes my phone usable.

Android doesn't seem as smart as it supposed to be, but I still like it.

~~~
orangecat
You have a misbehaving app. My N1 goes for weeks with no problems, and that's
been the case with stock 2.1, CM5, and the Froyo-based CM6. Find the bad app
and nuke it, rather than perpetually treating the symptoms.

~~~
1053r
To be fair though, this exposes a design flaw in Android. Technologies like
protected memory and pre-emptive multi-tasking are supposed to prevent
applications from gumming up the works. Along the same vein, we need some way
to identify and limit the resource usage of apps on Android. So now I can go
do binary search on my applications to see which one the bad one is, but am I
supposed to tell my girlfriend to do that on my old g1? It's a BAD (broken as
designed) issue with Android.

