Database Users

Atrix's (or Android's?) memory handling behavior -- auto shutdown of apps etc.

Hi fellas,
Something's been peeving me lately with the Atrix, and it's got to do with its memory handling & auto-killing functionality.
This particular situation has been driving me nuts:
I like to use both the native browser & and the Opera browser. Primarily I use the native browser, which is set as the default, and Opera when I want to check something and I want the full (non mobile) webpage layout and its superior (in my opinion) rendering quality and speed.
So, say I've got Opera open on Engadget or XDA, one or two tabs open. I hit the Home button and open Youtube to look something up. Finish the video, hit the Home button again, and launch Opera, and it has exited already and has to reload my tabs again. This of course can cause issues like losing my place in the page or a flash video I had paused, or a message I was typing and wasn't done with.
In this simple example, all I did was launch a browser, open 2 tabs (40-60 or maybe even 80 MBs of RAM usage, depending on page complexity), hit the Home button, launch the YouTube player (30 to 50 MBs RAM usage), hit the Home button again and Opera's already been killed.
OS Monitor shows there's about 470 MBs of RAM free.
What gives? Checking the autokill settings it shows that the OS will kill empty processes when free RAM hits 82 MBs of free RAM (default settings, haven't messed with them)
This behavior doesn't happen only right after a fresh reboot. Once I've opened a few apps, google readers, twitter, facebook, camera/gallery, browser etc., it happens every time. I say this because, while I'm not a programmer (beyond high school level C++ and general computer curiosity), from what I understand by watching the app life cycle videos on Google's Android programmer site, if Opera and YouTube were the last apps to be launched, they should have the highest priority in being kept in memory and not being killed, and previously open apps should be killed off to reclaim memory before them.
I found that using Gemini app manager I can set an app to not be killed automatically, and while I understand that it's not recommended that this is done by end users, it does work, and I use the Exit button in Opera to exit it once I'm done using it.
It just seems ridiculous that I always have between 350-450 of free RAM available to the system, while apps that I use often end up being killed in the background.
Before someone jumps on me, I understand that Android apps are designed to be shut down and reopened seamlessly. My annoyance stems from the behavior of a phone that has 836 MBs of RAM to work with, and about 570 available on startup (I've frozen several motorola processes I don't use, such as the social network integration and home launcher).

I just tried what you did (open opera, loaded bbc and endgadget, watch a youtube video than returned to opera) and opera retained everything including webpage, where I have scrolled to etc. I would suggest you to unfreeze the moto apps and try again, maybe that is what is causing the problem. Sorry I could not be of greater help =(

I'm not disagreeing with you -- like I said, it's not the case after a fresh reboot, or perhaps when not using the phone heavily. It had been a couple of days since rebooting the phone for me, and kept happening all evening long every time I switched apps.
Still, even when I force keep Opera open through the Gemini third party app manager, and while opening other apps, the RAM usage never goes below 300. The OS is overly aggresively in keeping RAM free, and considering it never falls below 100 MBs free of RAM, it shouldn't be shutting down apps EVER -- at least according to the autokill levels. Is there something else I should be looking at in determining when Android kills apps open in the background?
Was it just a fluke due to memory leaks, etc?
Edit:
Further research shows that Gemini app manager doesn't stop it from being killed, but rather removes it from its own auto task kill list (which I don't use). Seeing Opera stay open for a while after a fresh reboot shows that after two or three days of being used, the phone's memory management gets bogged down & that's what caused the very short app lifespan.
I wouldn't mind rebooting more frequently if it wasn't for that damned battery jumping issue.

Not really able to multitask due to constant low memory situation?

Hi,
I don't think this is limited to my device so I am asking here. Are you guys really able to multitask on your devices? On mine I start the web browser then I switch over a couple of apps and when I try to go bqck to the browser it gets launched all over again. Of course it remembers all the pages I have opened but they get reloaded. The same happens to other apps all the time. That drives me crazy. I installed an app called System Panel that I used to have on my HTC Desire and it shows that there are a lot of background services running and out of 700 megs of RAM it's only 50-80 free memory. Among those running apss there are services of widgets that I have never used like AP widget, world clocks, Yahoo finance, samsung hubs and etc. That's insane that such stuff occupies memory while apps that I really use gets killed so eagerly. Is there any way to improve on this behavior? My HTC desire seems to handle more apps at once than my GalTab :O
Marcin
Sent from my GT-P7500 using Tapatalk

I'm with you about the browser. So irritating that pages are reloaded when you leave the browser. I put starburst ROM on mine so I'm not sure if that took care of the RAM issues, but the reloading browser is pure fail. (BTW- I use dolphin for pad and it's the same).

I guess it's more a matter of the OS killing background apps to retain memory than the app behavior.
In Android an app(it's called an Activity) cannot forbid the operating system from killing it when the OS decides to. An app can only gets notified about the event of being killed to persist its state to be able to restore it later. And the browser does that.
What the problem really is here is that because of a lot of bloatware(including background services of Samsung hubs, Yahoo widget, Associated Press widget) running in background the OS is not having enough memory to keep the user apps runinng. So soon afther an app is put into background it gets killed to make space in memory for other apps.
And as far as I know killing thresholds for available memory are set to around 56 MB. And this happens to be around how much free memory is available for most of the time. So it makes any app put in background to be killed almost immediately. This makes the OS that is supposed to have an edge over iOS in terms of multitasking to be in fact able to run a single app at a time
And ifor example my HTC desire that runs vanilla Android 2.3.4 (Oxygen) seems to run with close to 200 MBs (out of 576MB built in according to the specs) of free RAM during normal operation. I do not use any task killers or any similiar tools. This makes the OS to easily handle multiple apps in background.

So, the question becomes: "how do we [permanently] kill all those background bloatware processes?"

freeze them with titanium backup

U guys realize it only reloads browser pages if u back out or hit the home button right? X the tabs out and ur browser will not do this
The only app that ever shows me the low memory msg is logmein ignition
Sent from my GT-P7510 using XDA Premium App

This is not really what we are talking about here. Try it this way. Open any page in a browser. GMail for instance. Log in and leave it this way. Now open the task switcher and go to some other app (e.g. Tapatalk). Navigate through some other apps and then select the task switcher and try to go back to your browser. You will notice that it was shut down silently and now it's started again. All previously open pages will be reloaded at this point. On my HTC Desire using the same scenario I end up with a web browser screen restored with the already open page not being reloaded. It even remembers what part of the page I scrolled down to.

bandit_knight said:
This is not really what we are talking about here. Try it this way. Open any page in a browser. GMail for instance. Log in and leave it this way. Now open the task switcher and go to some other app (e.g. Tapatalk). Navigate through some other apps and then select the task switcher and try to go back to your browser. You will notice that it was shut down silently and now it's started again. All previously open pages will be reloaded at this point. On my HTC Desire using the same scenario I end up with a web browser screen restored with the already open page not being reloaded. It even remembers what part of the page I scrolled down to.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So the honeycomb memory management system is doing its job and freeing up memory when the browser is in the background idle. You are complaining?

bluskye said:
So the honeycomb memory management system is doing its job and freeing up memory when the browser is in the background idle. You are complaining?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, it does not really. I just rebooted my device and noticed that now I can switch between tasks without having the one that I've just put into background immediatelly killed. Also after the reboot there is around 300 MB of free RAM compared to 50 MB thad I had after a few days of use. Also the entire device feels way more snappy now. Doesn't it look like a memory leak?

I have not seen this problem - can have many things running and still have close to 100mb memory free. Doesn't seem to have got worse from a few weeks usage, either. But I have noticed some running processes that I have never even opened, which is strange. Solution is definitely to root and then freeze the things you don't need, but personally I am not going to do this as my memory seems fine. You could try taking off certain widgets and not running certain programs after reboot to see if one thing in particular causes a big memory drain. Social Hubs? I have never even opened this as it caused a mess on my Samsung phone.

RAM manager - clear memory??

Once in a while if I notice a slight lag, I bring up the task manager (bottom left when accessing recent apps), go to the "RAM" tab and tap clear memory. What's really confusing me is that it always closes a very high number of apps, even if it's only been a day since I've last cleared it. i.e. I just cleared it and it said "27 apps closed"! There have been times where it was even more...once it was almost 40.
I use the phone a lot, but it's always the same handful of apps... at most, even in a given week I don't exceed using about 6-10 different apps.
So can someone please explain to me what the hell are all these dozens of "apps" being closed? ??? I assume they're including system apps in with the regular apps, but what apps could they be? That's around 20 apps I had no idea were even running...

siciliano777 said:
Once in a while if I notice a slight lag, I bring up the task manager (bottom left when accessing recent apps), go to the "RAM" tab and tap clear memory. What's really confusing me is that it always closes a very high number of apps, even if it's only been a day since I've last cleared it. i.e. I just cleared it and it said "27 apps closed"! There have been times where it was even more...once it was almost 40.
I use the phone a lot, but it's always the same handful of apps... at most, even in a given week I don't exceed using about 6-10 different apps.
So can someone please explain to me what the hell are all these dozens of "apps" being closed? ??? I assume they're including system apps in with the regular apps, but what apps could they be? That's around 20 apps I had no idea were even running...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
They're system apps, if you're rooted you could install an app like Clean Master and take a look at which system apps are running.

Keep specific apps open in background

I know that the S8 toggles some apps into "standby mode" to save energy when they haven't been used for a few minutes.
However, anyone can edit the list of apps that are being turned into standby and there's a few apps (mainly games) that I want to keep active.
Of course those games are not in my list but nevertheless they restart when I launch them agajn from the overview of active apps.
That sucks and I don't really get it.
I had a very cheap China phone with 1 GB RAM before my S8 and although I had about 10 apps opened, my games never restartet if I switched back over to them.
The S8 has 4 GB RAM, yet it restarts my games or is not capable of keeping them open.
Can I do something about that?
Pokémon GO is one of those games. I play it, press the home button, chat with Telegram, open the app overview to switch back to Pokémon and it starts over, showing me the NIANTIV logo and the loading screen.

Sharing our 7x lag experience and hopefully finding the cause.

Mine seemed fine at first, but freezes randomly and often takes over a minute for the camera app to start.
Tried, but didn't help-
Disabled the factor version of Facebook and the Facebook app manager. Re-installed FB from the play store.
Tried, and helped some-
Uninstalled Action Launcher. Simply switching back to the stock launcher seemed to help moderately at least in the launcher UI. Did not help with the camera.
Removed 128GB SD card. I was using this to store all my pictures and music. Quite inconvenient to go without it, but it did help some. Camera still opens slow, but it is more like 10 - 15 seconds rather than 1-2 minutes.
Tried, and helped a lot-
Developer options- Background process limits set to 'at most 4 processes.' This helped a lot. There was still random slowdowns, but never had a frozen screen for longer than a second or two. Unfortunately this made some apps misbehave, especially facebook when opening via a notification.

Seems to be fixed for the most part on Oreo.