Database Users

Android running apps behavior

Ok, I have the task killer app, but not sure how to determine what apps are ok to have running in the background and not suck up juice...
Seems odd to me that all the apps, even some that have an 'exit' menu item still linger after closing.
I searched about this forum (and wiki), but did not see similar questions.
It's probably so obvious that it doesn't register...
Thx!

Don't kill things like Alarm Clock, Messages, Touch Input, etc. Background apps only suck juice and use data if the app's themselves connect to the internet or use background data, if you aren't using background data, then disable it (there are third-party apps to toggle it mobile data and GPS on and off through widgets).
Personally, I used a task-killer and thought it would extend my batter but your battery life doesn't go down any faster killing tasks. My phone runs faster and smoother with it uninstalled and my battery was mostly draining because I had mobile networking on. Turn that off when you aren't using it (including GPS) and your battery life will increase two-fold. Not as much to do with background apps as you think.

Ok, thanks!
I have to Rogers too, but in my readings, everyone has said use the task killer, so I thought that was standard operating procedure. Then surprised a stock system didn't have anything like that installed.
I had left wifi and gps enabled on my Pure (Topaz) and battery life wasn't that bad. Would turn off when not in use. Does this one just stay on all the time?
-P

It will stay on all the time unless you turn it off via Settings or a third-party widget installed through the marketplace. As said in a few topics, Android is a Linux based OS meaning it's meant to handle the loads of apps running at the same time, it's how Linux handles RAM that makes Android fast. Running background apps do not mean they are literally running in the background, like in windows when you open 18 different windows and minimize a few, the programs are still running full capacity. Linux saves the applications settings and puts the application on 'idle' or a 'sleep' mode that allows the application to run in the background without it affecting battery life much. (I believe that's how it works.)
Don't worry about the task managers and just get some third-party toggle widgets installed from the market place.

I should have been more clear in my original question, sorry.
I'm quite familiar with *IX, been using / running / admin since 86.
I was mostly concerned with misbehaving apps (apps in background that continue to chew cycles), or devices that do not go idle when not in use. Generally unusual stuff that will drain the battery, not necessarily the obvious.
My experience with Android prior to this phone with with Android 2.0 as a work in progress on the HTC Topaz (which I am selling), and I constantly used task killer. I'm using it as a bad reference, I know it was in early stages of devel, but it was hard to tell what was draining the battery (and it got very warm).
I just unlocked my Sapphire last night and so far am very happy with it.
One thing that I wondered: is the expectation that if it gets slow, or if memory/swap starts to run low/out, you should reboot it? I guess that is why there is no task killer initially installed?

Remove Moxier apps?

Is there any way to remove/uninstall the moxier apps. I dont have any use for them.

To my knowledge, it won't be possible to uninstall until the X10 is rooted. In the mean time try an app like Startup Auditor to disable (and keep disabled) Moxier.

Man, that works! Great
More than 50 mb saved !

I installed Startup Auditor and it still doesn't block Moxier, because of all the events Moxier loads itself at.
These are the events:
After Startup
Connectivity Changed
Storage Low
Storage OK
Application Replaced
After Startup
Connectivity Changed
Storage Low
Storage OK
Application Replaced
Timezone Changed
Time Changed
Call State Changed
Service State Changed
Time Changed
Call State Changed
Service State Changed
Startup Auditor hooks itself to the bolded ones.
Is there another app that could do the trick?

I'm also using Advanced Task Manager, which can be set to kill apps at set intervals (as often as every 30 minutes). So I have that set, and made sure Moxier is not on my exclusion list.
Using JuiceDefender too, which will at least limit data connections while the phones is on standby so as to preserve battery power. Works well.

i use TaskPanel Lite which I think is better than Startup Auditor.
Every time you screen turns off - TaskPanel switches of the apps you do not want running.
And with ultimate juice (Juice Defender free + payable extension) battery life is getting acceptable.

Killing Moxier
I have Startup Auditor set to kill off Moxier as above and also have TasKiller (paid version) running and set to kill all apps on screen off, that seems to kill of Moxier pretty well

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

the lag vs apps

Now when installed a lot of apps including juicedefender and advanced task killer (set to aggressive when screen off with lots of exclusions) the lag has become more of an issue.
Now tell me whats the logic behind having installed a lot of apps and a lag? Running several apps multitasked will offcource produce performance-dips but just having them installed?
What exactly is "aggressive" on the task killer anyway? Some people say its just bad to kill tasks.
I have the idea that its the widgets that causes trouble, since they actually needs to run in the background all the time. I noticed today that the fancy-widget got stuck on upboot for like 60 seconds, that caused the 4 buttons below to not load properly. Alto the rather useless "daily brefing" seems to slow down.
I dont want to root and hack with sd-hacks now when froyo is confirmed to be released officially soon.
Do you have experice with sertain apps/widgets causing lag. If so, it would be great to make a list of "bad" apps.
PS, I tested the 30-day navigon today in car and it worked with no problems at all. Fix in 2 seconds and right on track.

robnil said:
Now when installed a lot of apps including juicedefender and advanced task killer (set to aggressive when screen off with lots of exclusions) the lag has become more of an issue.
Now tell me whats the logic behind having installed a lot of apps and a lag? Running several apps multitasked will offcource produce performance-dips but just having them installed?
What exactly is "aggressive" on the task killer anyway? Some people say its just bad to kill tasks.
I have the idea that its the widgets that causes trouble, since they actually needs to run in the background all the time. I noticed today that the fancy-widget got stuck on upboot for like 60 seconds, that caused the 4 buttons below to not load properly. Alto the rather useless "daily brefing" seems to slow down.
I dont want to root and hack with sd-hacks now when froyo is confirmed to be released officially soon.
Do you have experice with sertain apps/widgets causing lag. If so, it would be great to make a list of "bad" apps.
PS, I tested the 30-day navigon today in car and it worked with no problems at all. Fix in 2 seconds and right on track.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I haven't used it in a while, but "spare parts" in the marketplace tells you which apps are consuming your processor IIRC. This will obviously give you a temporary hit to your ability to load and run processes but will let you know more details about your phone that you don't already have and the battery use section of settings obviously only talks about what is using your battery but that isn't going to tell you the whole picture.
I am also someone who says you shouldn't use ATK, at least the way you do, but I have it installed and use it a bit differently. What I try to do is kill all tasks after I've used the marketplace or before I do anything intensive (gaming, GPS tracking) and I kill all apps including ATK. ATK will consume processor, battery and will free up memory which then Android uses to open more tasks you don't need (using processor and battery in the process -> repeat cycle). If you need to free up memory 1-5 times a day I think my way will save maybe 15-30% of your battery over a 24 hour period while costing you less than a minute of hassle (too much for some, sure). Again, I only kill after marketplace (because everything opens to check for updates, AFAIK) and before something that will use heavy memory and processor.

robnil said:
Now when installed a lot of apps including juicedefender and advanced task killer (set to aggressive when screen off with lots of exclusions) the lag has become more of an issue.
Now tell me whats the logic behind having installed a lot of apps and a lag? Running several apps multitasked will offcource produce performance-dips but just having them installed?
What exactly is "aggressive" on the task killer anyway? Some people say its just bad to kill tasks.
I have the idea that its the widgets that causes trouble, since they actually needs to run in the background all the time. I noticed today that the fancy-widget got stuck on upboot for like 60 seconds, that caused the 4 buttons below to not load properly. Alto the rather useless "daily brefing" seems to slow down.
I dont want to root and hack with sd-hacks now when froyo is confirmed to be released officially soon.
Do you have experice with sertain apps/widgets causing lag. If so, it would be great to make a list of "bad" apps.
PS, I tested the 30-day navigon today in car and it worked with no problems at all. Fix in 2 seconds and right on track.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Forgot the first part of your question, forgive me. I believe, the reason for more apps causing more lag is at least 2 fold. There are more apps that can be opened when you have free memory (in the vicious cycle I described above). There is also something that might be a bit unique to our phone, and I've only recently read this, it's a bit of speculation so I'm not trying to pass it off as fact but I think it's likely to be knowledgeable on the issue, even if not completely correct. Samsung's internal storage method is an SD card, that allows extra apps to be written to the internal storage but comes with a trade off of lag due to a potential combination of:
slow random-access
bad partition
I think I'm missing an important reason, I'll try to look and edit.

When I initially got my SGS I loaded it with a heap of apps and suddenly noticed the lag and quick battery drain. Problem was I couldn't track down the culprit.
I recently reset my device and was a bit more organized with what I installed. One of the things I started doing was checking what services were being used in the process which you can find under the manage apps part of the system.
So while you can load apps and they may/may not be killed by android or a task killer, the services will always be running - taking up memory, sometimes cpu, network. Things like weather checking, news checking, even email sync are some examples. These services plus any apps you run are I think what starts the lag. You need to be aware of which apps are also run as services.
Yes, there are some bad apps (last Facebook version was found to be a heavy drain) but I think they tend to add up with all the other services running.
As for 'Aggressive' depends on the app killer but my understanding (with the one I use), is that there is a memory limit before the app is killed. Once the limit is reached on aggressive, it doesn't take much before memory is cleared.
One thing to install is SeePU as this gives an indication of CPU, memory and network on the top menu bar. This also helps when the system lags (usually CPU is high and memory is low) and helps to know when to clean (or what threshold to set).
Hope this helps.

How do you save your battery from draining

As all our custom roms are in devlopment there is still battery draining issue but i found a some ways to maximise the battery
1 setcpu
use setcpu and set minimum frequency to 128 in stock rom it is set as 245 so change it also i think some of us dont know the profile function in setcpu i have set as when the screen turns off the cpu should run on minimum frequency ie 128
2 titanium backup
use this app to freeze some of the application that starts automatically on startup
you can also use diffrent freezing apps that are available in the market i use this app
3 cyanogenmod settings
in the performance setting disable all the options ie use of jit compiler , surface dithering etc and also set VM heap size to 24 or 16 belive me or not this is not affecting the performance to much extent still i am getting quadrant score greater than 1000
4 use of 3g
with diffrent experiments i have learnt that wifi consumes more battery than 3g i
am also not sure this is true or not
this are some of the setting you can use to increase your battery you can also
use automatic task killer, decrease brightness,turnoff background sync,disabling live wallpaper, use of 2g connections etc etc.
with this setting i am able to save my battery for more than a day
also guys tell me what you do to save your battery
if you like my post pls thank

Its a shame that the battery capacity is too low in these phones. Anyways this is what I do to extend the battery:
1. Use auto-brightness (in froyobread ROM)
2. Use automatic data disabling applications
3. Only 1 application gets internet connection for auto-sync when phone is idle (so the other ones can use that gap to sync too)
That's all.... you may want to set your account auto-sync off... but that's no good if you rely in gmail, google calendar, etc...

I have read somewhere that task killers "kill" the battery!
Don't use them! You'd better use apps like Fast reboot!
And about titanium backup..
Freeze (or delete) the Email.apk not Gmail.apk.
Also the Maps.apk if you don't need it!

anant123 said:
I have read somewhere that task killers "kill" the battery!
Don't use them! You'd better use apps like Fast reboot!
And about titanium backup..
Freeze (or delete) the Email.apk not Gmail.apk.
Also the Maps.apk if you don't need it!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Advanced Task Killer does that on my x8.

I use some tips from here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=726381
and use powermax from the market.

in my experience,in the night my battery 40% left i let my data traffic turned off and 2g only network, i let the music played with phone speaker 50% volume.
im falling a sleep, and in the morning i still hear the music and the battery 8% left.
i use froyobread