Discuss Task Managers/Killers Here!

[rabernet]

SystemPanel doesn't have auto-kill though, so ATK is still needed.

Sure it does! Go into the app, and choose End Task.

 

[shantheman#AC]

All I know is this: My EVO was dying after 4 hours. I had ATK installed. I went to Sprint...they switched out phones...and I DID NOT install ATK this time. Guess what? I'm on my 18th hour with about 1/3 charge left.

Maybe the first phone was defective...but my hunch (and Sprint's) was the ATK was the culprit. The first phone was always warm to the touch...always draining FAST.

No Task Killers for me right now. Performance is much better.

 

[thevacantsoul]

I don't use task killers at all...battery on my evo lasts around 12 to 14 hours on 3g with not too many HTC widgets running.

 

[danielkogan]

Task killers are not worth it. placebo effect. Simple. People get it straight.

 

[jmjccwatson]

I have no idea about the inner workings of the phone or alot of the lingo that some use on here however i was reading about ways to improve battery life and ran across the ATK program. I was skeptical at first but then said what the hell. load it and if it sucks remove it. I was taking my Evo of th charger around 06:30 - 07:00 and then i would have to put it back on at 1330 -1400. I would be at about 15-20 % . I loaded the ATK yesterday and had battery until 17:30 and 20 %. So i got about 2-3 more hours out of my battery. so proof is in the pudding i guess. Like i said im not the most tech savvy.

 

[akarol]

Sure it does! Go into the app, and choose End Task.

How is End Task an auto-kill feature? Do you even know what I'm talking about?

 

[Paladin]

I also disabled ATK. I am fairly sure it was causing more battery drain using it than without it for me as well. I am leaving it disabled until other evidence tells me otherwise.

 

[bere09]

This is just a Noobs view on this thread, but it sounds like the people in the "NO TASK KILLERS!!!!!" camp are fine with only getting 12-13 hours out of their phone before recharging and the "TASK KILLERS ARE AWESOME" camp are the ones who think that 12-13 hours before having to charge is awful battery life.

Also, all evidence that I have seen about why not to use task killers talks about killing tasks "if memory is needed". Memory is not what we are talking about, battery life is. These are two completely separate things.

 

[jnadelman]

I don't understand any of this task techie talk. I know people say use it and others say don't. I have no clue. People say it improves the battery, others say it makes it drain faster. Ugh....
But someone explain this to me. I installed one based on the recommendation of the store I got the phone at. I started my phone this morning and about 5 minutes later I ran the task killer. It claimed it closed 17 apps!. I hadn't started a single one. So, is someone really going to tell me that those 17 apps aren't really running? Are you saying that they don't use any battery power at all? Sure, maybe that are using memory that would be freed when more is needed, but why should they be using any memory at all?

I'm ok with not using a killer. I would like to hear someone from either Sprint, Google or HTC actually say that!. I would rather get some of these stupid apps to not start at all, but everyone says that you can't uninstall them or stop them. Dumb.

 

[Eazy123]

I can understand why some applications are running, but then there's the Amazon MP3 app, and for the life of me I can't understand why it's necessary that it runs.

However, upon checking the details on these running processes/apps, most don't even use much memory. HTC music player shows 8kb, etc...the internet shows 10mb but after setting the cache limit lower that uses less now.

I'm not bothering with the task killers. It just feeds my OCD and I'll never get anything else done that way.

 

[RayStinkle]

I don't understand any of this task techie talk. I know people say use it and others say don't. I have no clue. People say it improves the battery, others say it makes it drain faster. Ugh....
But someone explain this to me. I installed one based on the recommendation of the store I got the phone at. I started my phone this morning and about 5 minutes later I ran the task killer. It claimed it closed 17 apps!. I hadn't started a single one. So, is someone really going to tell me that those 17 apps aren't really running? Are you saying that they don't use any battery power at all? Sure, maybe that are using memory that would be freed when more is needed, but why should they be using any memory at all?

I'm ok with not using a killer. I would like to hear someone from either Sprint, Google or HTC actually say that!. I would rather get some of these stupid apps to not start at all, but everyone says that you can't uninstall them or stop them. Dumb.

yes, that is EXACTLY what we are saying. those 17 apps are static, they are cached, in a frozen state. they are not actually running or using any resources. they are cached in the background but inactive.

again if you install system panel, you will see exactly what these apps are doing. i'll repeat, all other task managers do not give you the true info of your running apps. ATK, task killer, etc all of these DO NOT show you what is active vs inactive. system panel will show you what is going on in 3 categories:

running apps
cached (inactive) apps
system processes

everything in the second category, inactive cached, are using absoluitely ZERO resources. they are just pre-loaded, cached, in a frozen state. they are static, and just loaded to fill empty memory so that should you decide to actually open one of these apps, it opens much faster. it takes no extra power to hold something in memory as it does to hold "nothing" in memory. so this is the way android OS works.

what you DO have to worry about is the apps in the first category. and ATK, task killer etc, do NOT show you the difference between these.

 

[Eazy123]

what you DO have to worry about is the apps in the first category. and ATK, task killer etc, do NOT show you the difference between these.

Ok, I downloaded System Panel and it's showing my internet is running. I got out of that. I don't want it draining my battery! Am I going to have to quit out of it through System Panel every time?

 

[jnadelman]

So here is what system panel says is running

Advanced Task killer (service, 12.1m)- of course since I have that running.
com.smithmirco.DM (service, 11.9m)
Gmail (background, 12.4m)
HTC DM (service, 12.3m)
HTC IQAgent (service, 12.1m)
HTC Sense (background, 43.6m)
People (background, 23.2m)
Settings (background, 19.7m)
System Panel (foreground, 14.6) - of course running since I am in it
Touch input (visible, 17.0m)

everything else is in the Inactive Applications section.
so, is everything I have OK?

 

[RayStinkle]

So here is what system panel says is running

Advanced Task killer (service, 12.1m)- of course since I have that running.
com.smithmirco.DM (service, 11.9m)
Gmail (background, 12.4m)
HTC DM (service, 12.3m)
HTC IQAgent (service, 12.1m)
HTC Sense (background, 43.6m)
People (background, 23.2m)
Settings (background, 19.7m)
System Panel (foreground, 14.6) - of course running since I am in it
Touch input (visible, 17.0m)

everything else is in the Inactive Applications section.
so, is everything I have OK?

yeah so now these are your truly active apps, ones that are actually taking up resources (ram and cpu). but you can go into each one individually and see just exactly what percentage of cpu its taking up, and its activity.

yes you can kill some of these if you wish, and i guess you could even use your other task killer to auto kill these. but if you actually use the system panel monitoring function (just went to paid version only last week), you will see what resources these are actually using thru the day.

for example, i can go into monitoring, and pick the last 8 hours, and it will show my a list of top apps that used ANY cpu, and put them in order of highest to lowest. and you can click in each on individually and see exactly when that app actually did something, and what percentage cpu it took up doing it.

for my usage on my nexus, i have my browser running all the time, with many other apps than what you listed. but when i check over an 8 hour period, the top app is the android system OS, and it uses only 2%.

so what i am saying is that the browser uses ZERO resources in the background. other apps like my twitter, battery widget, etc you can track ALL that, and determine what is using cpu resources over 8 hours, or a week, or whatever time period you want.

my point is this will show you what, if anything, it really means having these apps "always running".

hope i made sense.

 

[RayStinkle]

Ok, I downloaded System Panel and it's showing my internet is running. I got out of that. I don't want it draining my battery! Am I going to have to quit out of it through System Panel every time?

yeah so if you actually go into the browser on system panel, it shows you more details. what you will find is that when in the background, it doesnt use any resources. it doesnt re-load web pages in the background or any of that stuff. you can close it if you want though.

it sucks because system panel JUST ended beta last week. so now you have to pay to use the monitoring function. but with monitoring, it gives you all info of EXACTLY what is using your resources over a 2 hour period, 8 hour, day, or week, etc. its the most useful info you can get of anything out there.

 

[RayStinkle]

one other thing i forgot. when looking at the "inactive" apps list, if you sit there and hit the refresh button, you can often times see apps just disappear as you refresh. its very easy for the OS to just release those static apps from memory when i needs to, and as you can see it uses no cpu at all to do so (watching the cpu meter at top, and also next to each app).

Edit: and make sure You enable system processes to be displayed. It's in the settings. Has important info as well.

 

[maddmatt02]

ok, I will eventually read all these pages, but for now Im just gonna post my experience. I have played with the wifes hero since launch, and I got a evo on launch. I had her phone w/o task killers every once in a while for a few days and we always went back.k even on the evo I tried to not use one because of the articles linked to. I installed one. I tried again without and it just doesnt cut it. eventually the phone starts to slow down, eventually to the point that there is a delay in everything. want to swipe to the next home screen, well swipe your finger and then after you lift your finger it starts to slide. the actual action of flipping the the next screen still goes smooth once its started its transitiont though. and apps seem to run decent once your in them, but nothing responds near as fast as when I use a killer to end all the crap running. I have one set up now that ignores every app related to a widget, autokills on sleep the apps I know I rarely use if ever, like voice dialer, peep, etc... and I just have a checkmark by the rest of the ones so that I can for the most part leave it alone and if I feel the need I click the task manager widget to end all with a check mark. its going pretty good but I think I will still end up going back to autokilling more stuff...

until android can run as good w/o one as it does with one, I will cotinue to use one. I read android can/does end processes when they finish and if they havent been used in a long time. but even without autokilling anything, and not using the phone for 8 hours at work, I wake it up and task manager shows a ton of crap running...

 

[Paladin]

until android can run as good w/o one as it does with one, I will cotinue to use one. I read android can/does end processes when they finish and if they havent been used in a long time. but even without autokilling anything, and not using the phone for 8 hours at work, I wake it up and task manager shows a ton of crap running...

I was playing with my Evo yesterday and had about 15 to 20 programs that I could see listed that I opened. I thought that seemes like a lot of things to keep in memory, but as others have said, they are frozen not taking up any actual resources.

My battery has been great since I did the main tips. I am NOT running ATK anymore. I honestly am now in the don't need a task killer camp.

I can only speak from my experiences but at this stage I think running ATK hurt my battery and performence. I am leaving the OS run as it was intended.

I do have TaskOS installed if I really want (read get an urge) to kill something but I have only used it a few times and only on the very large programs like Google Earth etc... I don't think I will use it much.

 

[RayStinkle]

i am a firm believer that using auto kill does in fact make your battery life worse, because it is performing an action at a regular interval, which eats resources. then the OS re-opens all those apps, thus using MORE resources again. over and over. just leaving the OS alone to do its thing, those apps just sit in memroy frozen, static, not using anything. so i think its actually worse.

 

[willsurg#AC]

so would it be a safe assumption that even the people who say that task killers should not be used because they use up the battery themselves etc.. Are ok with system pannel being run? I ask because I noticed it also can kill running processes and so I removed it thinking it was just another task killer. thanks in advance!