Oh, you're talking top apps...when I say 16-20% I'm talking where it says average consumption. Any monitor run I do never shows an app using more than 2% either. As I said before, I think I had Average Consumption confused with how much the app is CURRENTLY running, my bad. I do see what you mean where System Panel's bar is the only thing moving - like I said I had no idea that was the current CPU usage. I viewed System Panel while using Pandora and sure enough, Pandora was showing movement in its vertical bar as well.
What I did with the Google image thing was I did a search, allowed all the thumbnails to load and then backed out - using the home button or back button, it didn't matter, my average consumption was 20-30%. But that was my mistake, and I think I've figured it out now - that was AVERAGE consumption. I think it takes the time since the app was started and divides that by the total CPU time. So if I have a ton of images loaded in Internet, that's going to take more CPU than a bunch of text, and if it's been say, 1 minute that I've used Internet, the average is going to be high, but as the time goes on since I've loaded the app, that average declines slowly.
When I was using the weather channel app, I noticed the average consumption would skyrocket if I had viewed the map, but once I closed out of it, it wasn't using the CPU after all. That's me thinking out loud but I think I get it now. They really should have better documentation on this. So the vertical bar to the left of each active application is what I need to pay attention to.
EDIT: And now I'm looking at my "Inactive" apps, and Android Market and Abduction are both still showing CPU usage. I thought they were inactive? I'm going to remove Abduction since I don't use it much anyway.
no i was talking about the same thing, just your main active apps list, when you click into an item, it shows average consumption. then i went on to say that "top apps" is where you can get additional info.
so yes that vertical bar is current real time cpu usage, and of my 15 runnning apps, none of them rarely ever show any activity other than system panel itself. that's why i'm so confused that you can see any movement on the browser when you minimize it to the background. mine always shows no movement, unless i click a link and immediately go to system panel. then i can watch it use cpu while it loads the page, and when its done loading in the background it goes down to zero.
so yeah i believe it just takes cpu and divides by time to give the average. i pay more attention to what it shows for the browser in top apps, since you can see the graph and compare it to the blue graph below it which is device usage. so you can correlate all the times you are using the device, and the browser usage lines up with that perfectly. and all the times the blue graph shows no activity, browser shows no activity as well. its a great way to really see what is using cpu when you are not using your device.
and since the top apps list more or less shows everything that hits your cpu, you can go thru one by one in the top apps list, go into each one, set your time peroid, and compare that process cpu usage vs blue device usage and line them up. this is easier once you have a full day's worth of data to view.
i'm really baffled by the inactive apps showing any movement on the vertical cpu bar. i never noticed that before, and i cant check right now cause i'm running froyo (its a long story to explain). but i am almost positive that all items in that inactive list are static, frozen, using no resources. in fact i've watched that list as a repeatedly click the refresh button on the bottom, and see apps drop out and re-appear as you keep hitting the button. it really shows how the OS can release any of those apps in an instant with no load placed on the system. it needs some RAM, a few disappear, etc.
so what i HAVE learned from system panel is that everything running in active apps can have 3 states, foreground, background, and visible.
foreground is kinda obvious. and background is obvious kinda too. but sometimes an app will show background, and then later that same app will show as a "service", so i'm still trying to figure that out.
when it says "visible", that means that you have just backed out of that app with the back button, and if you hit the refresh button below, it will disappear in a few moments and sometimes move itself down to the inactive category. and other times it will just disappear completely. the status "visible" has something to do with the stack that the application was placed in. for example if you open up lets say gmail, then your notification shade shows a new google voice message, then again another notification comes up for new text. now you have 3 applications in the "active stack", and using the back key to go all the way out back to the homescreen, gmail will be the last one on the stack. and it will say "visible". but that really means closed because refresh button and its gone in a few seconds. similarly, if you just open an app, then back out using back button, it will say visible, then usually disappear, cause you just had one app in the stack.
for the first month i HATED android cause it wasnt like symbian where i could understand what apps close and what dont. i still dont understand everything, but i feel a decent grasp after playing with system panel for a while.
if you really wanna get pissed, running froyo completely changes the way the OS handles all this. in fact it seems like google completely got rid of the "inactive cached" apps idea, because they do not show up in froyo. only 2 lists, active and system processes. there isnt 25 preloaded apps running in froyo. some might think this is a good thing. however i STILL see weird stuff going on in main active list. like it still loads up some things that i wonder why, but at least its a lot less and simplifies things. nobody knows if this is intentional on google's part, or just not the final release of the OS, or what. cause its not in the changelog for 2.2.
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