Database Users

How to kill Processes

On MemMaid / Running Processess, which one to close and which one to not.
Let me know as I really don't know which ones to shut down
:roll:

Confused. Why are you trying to close processes? To optimize performance?

Yes, for faster optimization.

scoundrel: the better strategy, for optimisation, is to first find out why those apps are opening. Check your startup folder, services etc, notifications, and remove apps that shouldn't be necessary.
Killing them is not a good form of optimisation, you will waste memory from dead apps etc.
V

Excessive CPU usage on X10

Hi
I've just recently bought an XPERIA X10 and one issue I have found is its apparent heavy CPU usage. I would go so far as saying that the phone is close to unusable when it has just booted. So here goes my findings...
I've installed a program called CPU Usage (quite logically) which monitors CPU usage for various tasks on the phone. Here is what I get when the phone has just been booted:
PID / Name / CPU Usage
954 / Sync Feeds/Checking Service/Setting Storage/Android System / 39-58% (No, I'm not kidding)
1054 / Download Manager/DRM /23-31% (still not kidding)
1171 / Face Recognition Service / 11-12% (not as bad, but still, why is it even there???)
The worst thing is that these services don't stop using the CPU - no, they keep on running and using CPU in the designated ranges, unless I kill them.
So I go and kill them using another program I installed.
I found out that if I kill the Face Recognition Service, the CPU usage of the DRM service disappears as well. So everytime I start the device, I have to go kill this service so I can actually use the phone.
The Sync Feeds/Checking/Android service I can't kill, but even though CPU usage reports it as using between 40 and 60% CPU, it seems that another task manager do not report this CPU usage. I can also live with this, if it's a kind of background service that doesn't actually use half your CPU all the time.
So I guess my biggest problem with this is that the Face Recognition service that is run on startup takes many CPU resources, and I have to manually kill it so the phone is running at an acceptable speed. I can't explain why I get different reports for CPU usage on the Sync Feed/Android service, but maybe others can explain...
regards, Artur

You don't need to kill the background processes every time you start up, there is a program that lets you customize which programs and services start on boot, it name is startup auditor. It alseo lets you kill moxier services and timescape

If you use TaskManager you'll se that Moxier doesn't use much CPU at all. It's probably the system in general that uses it.

Tips to Configure Trask Manager / Process List

Greetings,
There are many task managers out in the market with various features. Because of Battery consumption issue and Ram management, without even knowing the impact we all (including myself) just kill tasks or programmes running in the system.
We should not forget its not Windows this is android. And its suppose to run better.
So far, for me this killing task has worked well by extending battery life from 10 hours to 3 days.
This thread is dedicated to discuss all these process so all the users know what they are doing. No matter what application used.
@ Developers/ Experts please share your technical knowledge on this.

Dont kill these tasks otherwise your timescape widget will not update
Com.sonyericsson.adroid.mediascape.pluginmanager
Com.sonyericsson.adroid.timescape.pluginmanager
Com.sonyericsson.adroid.contentmanager.service.timescape
Timescape
And these tasks I have eliminated from kill list as my phone start to become non responsive.
Com.google.android.providers.settings
Com.andorid.packageinstaller
Settings
Com.google.android.apps.uploader

i kill package installer without any side effects. what about sns provider and service account provider? What do those do anyone know? also is it safe to kill com.sonyericsson.learningclient

Chuteboxe39 said:
i kill package installer without any side effects. what about sns provider and service account provider? What do those do anyone know? also is it safe to kill com.sonyericsson.learningclient
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have kill all the SNS providers no problem.
I have no idea about com.sonyericsson.learningclient. right now its on my nonkill list.

And what about SemcIME and Wiper App? Do you kill them or not?

Zenghelis said:
And what about SemcIME and Wiper App? Do you kill them or not?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
SemcIME is related to sim card reading as my guess. dont kill this. I remember at times when i kill this i was unable to make calls unlill phone restart.
Wiper App add to non kill list. I have no idea what it dose. but im sure it helped me to extend my battery from the day I stopped killing it.

How about this article:
geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/
I, as an Android-newbie, found it very informative. I'm not using any task killer at all, and can extend my X10's battery life up to 3 days.
The TL;DR version:
* Android is hard coded to automatically kill a task when more memory is needed.
* Android is hard coded to automatically kill a task when it’s done doing what it needs to do.
* Android is hard coded to automatically kill a task when you haven’t returned to it in a long time.
* Most services (while possibly running in the background) use very little memory when not actively doing something.
* A content provider is only doing something when there is a notification for it to give. Otherwise it uses very little memory.
* Killing a process when it isn’t ready only causes it to have to reload itself and start from scratch when it’s needed again.
* Because a task is likely running in the background for a reason, killing it will only cause it to re-spawn as soon as the activity that was using it looks for it again. And it will just have to start over again.
* Killing certain processes can have undesirable side effects. Not receiving text messages, alarms not going off, and force closes just to name a few.
* The only true way to prevent something from running at all on your phone would be to uninstall the .apk.
* Most applications will exit themselves if you get out of it by hitting “back” until it closes rather than hitting the “home” button. But even with hitting home, Android will eventually kill it once it’s been in the background for a while.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I wouldn't go and kill any unfamiliar processes: Android handles processes in a far better way than Windows does.
I agree with the writer of the above article: try to figure out which apps/processes are consuming too much of your battery (i.e. CPU cycles, not necessarily RAM). Most of your problems could be caused by bad-programmed apps...
Which brings us to the following question: could it be that SE has put some bad-written programmes on the X10 themselves? I guess so

[Q] What takes up so much RAM?

Hi,
i just bought an Ideos x5 and it's great.
I've loaded most of the usuall stuff including task manager.
Now i found that on average my free memory when i'm not using so much apps is around 180(that's how much free RAM i have).
Is this normal..i mean...the thing says it has 512 mb of RAM.
Sorry for beeing a noob..
Van

its said 128MB go to the GPU, 32MB are used by android system, which leaves about 352MB (353MB as shown in Elixir) for application use..
and then those google apps (Maps, Search, Market, etc.) all take up RAM in the background, plus other background apps you have installed and widgets you have enabled..
on average i usually have around 80-120MB free RAM left.. and since android 2.2 is said to have a good task manager which frees up the RAM when needed, i dont think its a place to worry about..

As iamelton said, Android's in-built task managing system does a good job of managing what apps are using the processor, memory and battery. Task manager apps don't really do all that much useful, and can sometimes be counterproductive if you're trying to use them to save battery. Lifehacker has a really great article on this called Android Task Killers Explained: What They Do and Why You Shouldn’t Use Them (I can't link because I don't have enough posts, but the article's a search away and is really worth reading). It runs through why it's generally best to avoid task manager/killer apps, plus it also explains how Android uses RAM - in a similar way to Windows Vista/7 (basically to speed up launching or re-opening apps).
It's probably worth noting that Android already has a function to force stop apps. If you go to Settings > About phone > Battery use, you'll get a list of what's been using the battery since it was last unplugged. Some widgets like Switch Pro have shortcuts to Battery use. It's useful if you've got Maps or a launcher or a rogue app sucking up battery in the background. As a rough idea, you may have an issue if anything not a system process is using more than 10%.
If you do need to force close an app, Battery use is generally the best way to go about it.

thx to cyvros for ur mentioning of the good article..
http://lifehacker.com/5650894/andro...ed-what-they-do-and-why-you-shouldnt-use-them
its a good read indeed, and for this topics discussion, i think the following paragraph gives a very good view on androids ram usage:
The problem is that Android uses RAM differently than, say, Windows. On Android, having your RAM nearly full is a good thing. It means that when you relaunch an app you've previously opened, the app launches quickly and returns to its previous state. So while Android actually uses RAM efficiently, most users see that their RAM is full and assume that's what's slowing down their phone. In reality, your CPU—which is only used by apps that are actually active—is almost always the bottleneck.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Explaining RAM, CPU usage and why you shouldn't use task-killers

I've seen some people complaining about how low RAM they have left in their phones and others suggesting task killers to manage the RAM and save battery. Well, that is not the case. So, I've gathered some information from the web so you can understand...
How processes and activities work on Android
Activity lifecycle
An activity has essentially three states:
It is active or running when it is in the foreground of the screen (at the top of the activity stack for the current task). This is the activity that is the focus for the user’s actions.
It is paused if it has lost focus but is still visible to the user. That is, another activity lies on top of it and that activity either is transparent or doesn’t cover the full screen, so some of the paused activity can show through. A paused activity is completely alive (it maintains all state and member information and remains attached to the window manager), but can be killed by the system in extreme low memory situations.
It is stopped if it is completely obscured by another activity. It still retains all state and member information. However, it is no longer visible to the user so its window is hidden and it will often be killed by the system when memory is needed elsewhere.
If an activity is paused or stopped, the system can drop it from memory either by asking it to finish (calling its finish() method), or simply killing its process. When it is displayed again to the user, it must be completely restarted and restored to its previous state.
The foreground lifetime of an activity happens between a call to onResume() until a corresponding call to onPause(). During this time, the activity is in front of all other activities on screen and is interacting with the user. An activity can frequently transition between the resumed and paused states — for example, onPause() is called when the device goes to sleep or when a new activity is started, onResume() is called when an activity result or a new intent is delivered. Therefore, the code in these two methods should be fairly lightweight.
Taken from the Android Developers site​
Android's built-in task-manager​
What people don’t seem to realize is that android is designed to have a large number of tasks stored in memory at all times. Why? Well basically we are talking about a mobile device. On a mobile device things tend to be slower. The hardware isn’t as robust as say a desktop or a laptop, so in order to get that same “snappy” feeling, there have to be workarounds.
One of these is how android deals with memory. Android will load up your apps and then keep them running until they absolutely HAVE to kill them. This is because that way, if you want to re-open an app, the system already has it loaded and can then just resume it instead of reloading it. This provides a significant performance increase.
What a lot of people don’t realize as well is that android kernels have their own task manager. This means that:
it will be more efficient than any app-based task manager as it is run at the kernel level, and
it should be left up to that task killer to decide when to free up memory
There is only one case where having a task killer is a good idea, and that is when you want to kill ONE SPECIFIC APP. Killing all apps is never a good idea. You don’t know what operations they are performing or if they are necessary.
Said from a very experienced ROM cooker​
CPU usage matters more​
This set-up implies that the goal of killing these apps is to free up memory. Nowhere on the list does it mention the number of CPU cycles each app is consuming, only the memory you’ll free by killing it. As we’ve learned, full memory is not a bad thing—we want to watch out for the CPU, the resource that actually slows down your phone and drains your battery life.
Thus, killing all but the essential apps (or telling Android to kill apps more aggressively with the “autokill” feature) is generally unnecessary. Furthermore, it’s actually possible that this will worsen your phone’s performance and battery life. Whether you’re manually killing apps all the time or telling the task killer to aggressively remove apps from your memory, you’re actually using CPU cycles when you otherwise wouldn’t—killing apps that aren’t doing anything in the first place.
In fact, some of the processes related to those apps will actually start right back up, further draining your CPU. If they don’t, killing those processes can cause other sorts of problems—alarms don’t go off, you don’t receive text messages, or other related apps may force close without warning. All in all, you’re usually better off letting your phone work as intended—especially if you’re more of a casual user. In these instances, a task killer causes more problems than it solves.
Said from Whitson Gordon of Lifehacker​
The more RAM available, the more Android will find ways to use it up which means your battery will be dead in hours.
From droid-life.com​
So that's it. Let the lovely green robot do the job for you while you're playing games or using the xda app or whatever...

More detailed article
We almost hate to approach the topic of Task Killers on Android after all this time, but with so many new faces here at Droid Life and in Android in general, it’s something that needs to be done. In fact, after seeing the Amazon app of the day and reading through the Twitter conversations we just had with many of you, this thing needs to be posted immediately. Let’s see if we can’t get you all some better battery life!
If this was 2009 and we were all running something less than Android 2.2, that statement plastered on that red banner might be somewhat correct. But since it is 2011 and the majority of people on the planet are running Android 2.2, we need to get you away from the mindset that killing off tasks on your phone is a good thing.
So rather than me blabbering about the inner-workings of Android and how it manages RAM for the 10,000th time, I’m going to just pull from some posts that friends of ours have done that explain this in the plainest of ways.
First up is our boy @cvpcs who you may know from CM and his Sapphire ROM days. He knows Android inside-and-out, so when he goes into memory management which is done by the OS itself, you should listen up:
…What people don’t seem to realize is that android is designed to have a large number of tasks stored in memory at all times. Why? Well basically we are talking about a mobile device. On a mobile device things tend to be slower. The hardware isn’t as robust as say a desktop or a laptop, so in order to get that same “snappy” feeling, there have to be workarounds.
One of these is how android deals with memory. Android will load up your apps and then keep them running until they absolutely HAVE to kill them. This is because that way, if you want to re-open an app, the system already has it loaded and can then just resume it instead of reloading it. This provides a significant performance increase.
What a lot of people don’t realize as well is that android kernels have their own task manager. This means that:
it will be more efficient than any app-based task manager as it is run at the kernel level, and
it should be left up to that task killer to decide when to free up memory
There is only one case where having a task killer is a good idea, and that is when you want to kill ONE SPECIFIC APP. Killing all apps is never a good idea. You don’t know what operations they are performing or if they are necessary.
Whitson Gordon of Lifehacker suggests that you should be more worried about CPU usage than what’s going on with your RAM. We agree:
This set-up implies that the goal of killing these apps is to free up memory. Nowhere on the list does it mention the number of CPU cycles each app is consuming, only the memory you’ll free by killing it. As we’ve learned, full memory is not a bad thing—we want to watch out for the CPU, the resource that actually slows down your phone and drains your battery life.
Thus, killing all but the essential apps (or telling Android to kill apps more aggressively with the “autokill” feature) is generally unnecessary. Furthermore, it’s actually possible that this will worsen your phone’s performance and battery life. Whether you’re manually killing apps all the time or telling the task killer to aggressively remove apps from your memory, you’re actually using CPU cycles when you otherwise wouldn’t—killing apps that aren’t doing anything in the first place.
In fact, some of the processes related to those apps will actually start right back up, further draining your CPU. If they don’t, killing those processes can cause other sorts of problems—alarms don’t go off, you don’t receive text messages, or other related apps may force close without warning. All in all, you’re usually better off letting your phone work as intended—especially if you’re more of a casual user. In these instances, a task killer causes more problems than it solves.
More on how Android has a built-in memory-management system, but also on how killing all tasks is not a good thing:
Android was designed from the ground up as an operating system (OS) for mobile devices. Its built-in application and memory-management systems were engineered with battery life as one of the most critical concerns.
The Android OS does not work like a desktop operating system. On a desktop OS, like Windows, Mac OS X, or Ubuntu Linux, the user is responsible for closing programs in order to keep a reasonable amount of memory available. On Android, this is not the case. The OS itself automatically removes programs from memory as memory is needed. The OS may also preload applications into memory which it thinks might soon be needed.
Having lots of available empty memory is not a good thing. It takes the same amount of power to hold “nothing” in memory as it does to hold actual data. So, like every other operating system in use today, Android does its best to keep as much important/likely-to-be-used information in memory as possible.
As such, using the task manager feature of SystemPanel to constantly clear memory by killing all apps is strongly NOT RECOMMENDED. This also applies to any other task killer / management program. Generally speaking, you should only “End” applications if you see one which is not working correctly. The “End All” feature can be used if your phone/device is performing poorly and you are uncertain of the cause.
And we could go on for hours with source after source on why task killers do nothing but work against Android, but you probably get the point now don’t you? Ready for a quick recap? OK.
Basically, Android keeps tasks handy because it thinks you’ll want to perform them again in a very short amount of time. If you don’t, it will clear them out for you. It also likes to keep as many things handy as possible so that the overall performance of your device is top notch. If Android were to completely kill off everything that your phone is doing, then it would require more resources to restart all of them and you would likely run into slowness and battery drains. By keeping certain things available to you, your phone is actually running better than it would without. So please, stop killing off tasks and let Android do the work for you.
Your goal for the week is wash your brain of the idea that having little RAM available is a bad thing. The more RAM available, the more Android will find ways to use it up which means your battery will be dead in hours. Instead, let it manage itself, so that you can spend more time playing Angry Birds or reading Droid Life.
All good now?
EDIT: http://www.droid-life.com/2011/06/02/revisiting-android-task-killers-and-why-you-dont-need-one/

Thanks Chris and Dare Devil.
I wondered why people didn't really use task killers...now I know...
Sent from my X8 using xda premium

Very helpful post. I'm always using task killer whenever i want.. I mean before playing a game, after playing a game and sometimes for no reason at all because there are so many things loaded up in the memory.... I have been wondering what drained my battery and i think this is the cause... Thanks to you people.:angel:

nice info buddy,,,
thanks.
:thumbup:
Sent from my E15i using xda premium

1. RAM Manager Pro? Does it work or does it mess with Android's RAM management on Kernel level?
2. Why is that when I load up the phone under running services>show cached processes I have a lot of processes running and after a half a days usage, that same page shows "Nothing running"?