Database Info

Sure fire way to stop background programs from running?

I'm attempting to try to increase my battery life so it lasts longer than 12 hours (~13 seems to be my limit). (I'll admit I'm a bit jealous of those who can run the phone 24+ hours) Though it's somewhat painful, I'm shutting down most the programs I have running in the background. However there seems to be a number that like to restart even after I think I've disabled their startup, widgets, notifications, etc.
Is there a way to make sure programs that you install don't run? Or at least don't launch during start up? Perhaps something like msconfig in windows?
Thanks.

Raleran said:
I'm attempting to try to increase my battery life so it lasts longer than 12 hours (~13 seems to be my limit). (I'll admit I'm a bit jealous of those who can run the phone 24+ hours) Though it's somewhat painful, I'm shutting down most the programs I have running in the background. However there seems to be a number that like to restart even after I think I've disabled their startup, widgets, notifications, etc.
Is there a way to make sure programs that you install don't run? Or at least don't launch during start up? Perhaps something like msconfig in windows?
Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Killing background tasks will only decrease your battery life. When an application goes to the background, it sits in memory but does NOT consume any CPU power. since the memory is in solid state, it requires no power to stay in that state. By constantly killing background applications, it will need to start up, reinitialize, and consume more power then if you had just left it alone. Also, long term performance will be negatively affected, even if you do expereince a small short term performance gain. the Android OS is designed at the core level to have applications behave this way, and modifying that behavior will make for a worse experience.

asrrin29 said:
Killing background tasks will only decrease your battery life. When an application goes to the background, it sits in memory but does NOT consume any CPU power. since the memory is in solid state, it requires no power to stay in that state. By constantly killing background applications, it will need to start up, reinitialize, and consume more power then if you had just left it alone. Also, long term performance will be negatively affected, even if you do expereince a small short term performance gain. the Android OS is designed at the core level to have applications behave this way, and modifying that behavior will make for a worse experience.
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Click to collapse
Eh, this is the first I've heard this. I don't remember reading this in the various battery optimization guides.
Still is there a was to stop things short of uninstalling? For example, I want to stop using the Yahoo Mail app but don't want to install yet. I went through all the options I could to disable checking/notifications, etc but it still pops back into memory constantly.

I assume youve tried the obvious, turn off WiFi (3G) and screen when not actively using it?! Those are the big batt.-eaters
Sent from my HTC Magic using XDA App

asrrin29 said:
Killing background tasks will only decrease your battery life. When an application goes to the background, it sits in memory but does NOT consume any CPU power. since the memory is in solid state, it requires no power to stay in that state. By constantly killing background applications, it will need to start up, reinitialize, and consume more power then if you had just left it alone. Also, long term performance will be negatively affected, even if you do expereince a small short term performance gain. the Android OS is designed at the core level to have applications behave this way, and modifying that behavior will make for a worse experience.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Documentation? As far as I have read an application does not go into any type of dehydrated state when running in the background / minimized. It can do anything it wants including using CPU cycles.
I do agree that most applications do not need to be killed with a task killer but leaving 3D games (for example) running in the background could hurt your battery. Also not all applications are progammed with ther same fore thought and skill level.
I get about 33% more runtime out of my battery using a task killer to kill specific applications that I know I do not want running in the background.

Streaker said:
I assume youve tried the obvious, turn off WiFi (3G) and screen when not actively using it?! Those are the big batt.-eaters
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I leave wifi on since I'm usually in range. It's more efficient than 3g right? I alway sleep the device when I'm done. I still have huge percentages on the screen when looking at the battery usage. I'm trying a completely black screen now.

Mainly your widgets and icons and stuff still cover large portions of it, so: a black screen will help, not but alot.
Also, to keep items in RAM, to the second poster... What do you think is keeping those items in RAM?
Ummm... It's the CPU.
Task Killers won't help you on RAM usage at all (Because Android will automatically shuffle them out if it has to, or so I've read... I've yet to hit max memory). Task Killers DO help you as far as battery use goes, though... Keeping the browser killed if you aren't using it, etc.

Bjd223 said:
Documentation? As far as I have read an application does not go into any type of dehydrated state when running in the background / minimized. It can do anything it wants including using CPU cycles.
I do agree that most applications do not need to be killed with a task killer but leaving 3D games (for example) running in the background could hurt your battery. Also not all applications are progammed with ther same fore thought and skill level.
I get about 33% more runtime out of my battery using a task killer to kill specific applications that I know I do not want running in the background.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I should clarify. I guess the term I meant to use is "suspended." If a program is actively "running" in the background, it will use CPU cycles. But if you simply stopped using a program, say for example the xda app, and returned to your homescreen, the application stays "suspended" in the background and consumes no CPU cycles until you go back to it. Now services that are updating, such as email or SMS, will use CPU cycles in the background because they are still actively running. But if you want to conserve battery life you can simply disable the notifications from most of these programs.

asrrin29 said:
I should clarify. I guess the term I meant to use is "suspended." If a program is actively "running" in the background, it will use CPU cycles. But if you simply stopped using a program, say for example the xda app, and returned to your homescreen, the application stays "suspended" in the background and consumes no CPU cycles until you go back to it. Now services that are updating, such as email or SMS, will use CPU cycles in the background because they are still actively running. But if you want to conserve battery life you can simply disable the notifications from most of these programs.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The app itself at that point may not be but the Android OS still does to maintain that suspended state.

I have some applications I rarely use or even some that I've never used but may want to in the future. I see absolutely no benefit in keeping these applications in the background. Further more, I've noticed a signficant drain on the battery when extra applications are running in the background. I'm sure it's not all of them, but I've yet to discover who exactly the culpit is. Right now I suspect it's the NPR app, perhaps due to data use?
The point is, there are perfectly good reasons to keep some apps in the background, and perfectly good reasons to kill others - or perferrably not have them start up at all unless I do it myself. Could be due to data usage (especially if you do not have unlimited data), could be due to concerns about excessive cpu usage. There really should be a clear method in which you can stop applications from opening on their own.

You can use the program "Autostarts" to keep applications from starting at startup. With it you can also prevent things from launching under a number of other situations. That might be what you are looking for. Just do a google search for the APK as I don't think it is in the market.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

Shuggins said:
You can use the program "Autostarts" to keep applications from starting at startup. With it you can also prevent things from launching under a number of other situations. That might be what you are looking for. Just do a google search for the APK as I don't think it is in the market.
Wouldn't tasker also help?
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
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Click to collapse
Sent from my AOSP on XDANDROID MSM using XDA App

To me, it's not a matter of "task killer or not", but rather when and where to use one. And I think it's simple: Don't bother, unless you suspect a specific app is doing something you don't want it to do in the background. Then, just kill that specific app and leave everything else alone. A Task manager that shows CPU% for each process can be handy for this as well.
I generally try to avoid killing tasks, but one night I had 50% battery on my phone and after about 2 hours or so I took it out of my pocket to make a phone call, and it was very hot and had about 12% of batter left -- something was running wild that shouldn't have been (I think it was Pandora, even though it was not currently playing any music!) So, background apps do occasionally run out of control, and you do need to occasionally kill them, but do it on an "as needed" basis.

Raleran said:
I'm attempting to try to increase my battery life so it lasts longer than 12 hours (~13 seems to be my limit). (I'll admit I'm a bit jealous of those who can run the phone 24+ hours) Though it's somewhat painful, I'm shutting down most the programs I have running in the background.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Unless the background process is syncing data, it won't eat your battery. So instead of wasting your time, you should focus on other energy hogs. Things like screen brightness, bluetooth, wifi, and gps.

Shuggins said:
You can use the program "Autostarts" to keep applications from starting at startup. With it you can also prevent things from launching under a number of other situations. That might be what you are looking for. Just do a google search for the APK as I don't think it is in the market.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
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Click to collapse
I installed Advanced Task Killer from the Market. It lets you kill all running applications including itself.
durrence

jsmith8858 said:
To me, it's not a matter of "task killer or not", but rather when and where to use one. And I think it's simple: Don't bother, unless you suspect a specific app is doing something you don't want it to do in the background. Then, just kill that specific app and leave everything else alone. A Task manager that shows CPU% for each process can be handy for this as well.
I generally try to avoid killing tasks, but one night I had 50% battery on my phone and after about 2 hours or so I took it out of my pocket to make a phone call, and it was very hot and had about 12% of batter left -- something was running wild that shouldn't have been (I think it was Pandora, even though it was not currently playing any music!) So, background apps do occasionally run out of control, and you do need to occasionally kill them, but do it on an "as needed" basis.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Or an auto-killer would've killed it before it killed your battery by 38% lol

Task Killings are bad, mmmkay...

Slightly off topic:
To help conserve battery power,
Use an all black desktop background since the black areas dont use battery power.

Hmm, people in this thread have said a few things that I haven't heard or seen much before. Specifically that killing apps could decrease battery life. When I first downloaded advanced task killer I tended to kill most things. I slowly backed off and now I've been watching what launches and what tends to come back and not kill those (mail apps, widgets, performance watchers, etc). The second is that not having a black background doesn't necessarily improve battery life. Makes sense considering I have icons everywhere on my screen.
@Shuggins - Thank you! That's exactly what I was looking for. I've downloaded it but now I have to, er charge my battery a bit before I can take a close look at it.
@jsmith8858 - Are you running setCPU? A couple days ago I noticed my battery running pretty hot. I stopped using setCPU and the battery cooled down a lot. I've used setCPU since them without the heat issue so I'm not sure what was going on.
Well during todays iteration I ran for about 12 hours (typical). I had a couple short phone calls, 2 email accounts syncing as well as other bg syncing processes. I did eat up 30% in an hour messing with a game. I'd probably have 13-14 hours if I didn't play anything (but if I didn't what's the point of the phone . Still, as much as I love it the screen is killing me. Guess there's nothing to do about it though (usually brightness is all the way down, turn it off when I'm not using it, using a darker background). I didn't kill any of my background processes today. I'm going to set up that Autostarts program and start auto-killing various programs tomorrow.

You can try using autokiller and art it to extreme, but I don't recommend this
Sent from my HTC Dream using XDA App

[Q] EC10 Mesmerize Process strain

Hi guys,
I have a USCC Mesmerize with EC10 PNP w/ none of the pack addons.
I would consider my phone to be very slim. I pretty much only use the camera, sms, mms, internet, & phone.
But still after my phone has been on for a while my process is up to 295/349 MB
I constantly use the stock task manager with Level 2 clear memory option to kill the active process.
When I do this I normally close anywhere from 5-12 process's. Sometimes I will get a drop to around 245MB and other times it will stick around 282MB
On a fresh restart my phone boots up with 164MB
I immediately goto task manager and do a level 2 clearing of the memory and end up closing 10 programs with a RAM use of 131MB
Is there anything out there app or otherwise I can use to stop and prevent all non-critical process's?

uselessmidget said:
Hi guys,
I have a USCC Mesmerize with EC10 PNP w/ none of the pack addons.
I would consider my phone to be very slim. I pretty much only use the camera, sms, mms, internet, & phone.
But still after my phone has been on for a while my process is up to 295/349 MB
I constantly use the stock task manager with Level 2 clear memory option to kill the active process.
When I do this I normally close anywhere from 5-12 process's. Sometimes I will get a drop to around 245MB and other times it will stick around 282MB
On a fresh restart my phone boots up with 164MB
I immediately goto task manager and do a level 2 clearing of the memory and end up closing 10 programs with a RAM use of 131MB
Is there anything out there app or otherwise I can use to stop and prevent all non-critical process's?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That sounds pretty normal from what I have seen. Are you having any issues or just like to see the Rom lower?

Actually android by design is supposed to run almost always at full ram/memory compacity. Using a task killer other than stock can give unwanted results. My phone runs the same as yours does. When you kill off task the systen will automaticly reload common and system apps. Its the nature of android. Unless your having really bad performance. I wouldn't worry about it.
Edit: Ninja'd.
Tap-a-Talked from my Mesmerize

I agree with akellar, that sounds pretty normal. I mean, are you actually suffering any performance issues? If you're not, then you're just worrying about nothing.

Similar stuff here. I use the level 2 clear as well, but mainly to save battery. I run the clear,just before I set it down for a no use period or prior to bedtime and it saves battery big time.
Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk

No not really any performance issues. Sometimes but its infrequent enough that I couldn't describe it.
That was mainly my thought was saving on battery.
Why have all this crap running if you aren't using it?

Technicly its not running. It is suspended. While it is in ram it isn't using any processing power until the app is brought to the foreground meaning you are using it. Android does this so these apps are ready to go when you need them. I quit using task killers other than the stock one a while back and noticed a big jump in battery and performance. I though they were helping me when in reality it was hurting me. Take a read on android and how it handles multi tasking. It explains it really well. I wish I had a link handy hut if you google it you will find several articles on it.
Tap-a-Talked from my Mesmerize

Yeah, you are actually wasting battery by having the screen on in order to end tasks that aren't actually running.

Either way, my battery lasts longer. I understand the logic, but in reality - my battery lasts longer.
Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk

I've read probably 20 or 30 articles on this explaining bboth sides and hundreds of user opinions who say to use them, don't use them, use them once a day, etc and why they think that. I really think it depends on what you do with your phone, because in my personal experience I am a heavy user of my phone, constantly switching applications and loading browsers and whatnot. If I don't use a taskkiller then my phone becomes unresponsive and almost unusable at times. I know you're supposed to stay away from them and I have tried that but it is really obvious that it is useful when I can press a button and have my phone actually work again.
For somebody like the OP that just uses it like a normal phone and not a computer like I do, you probably shouldn't use one unless you are really getting slowdowns. It all depends on what exactly is using the memory and not getting killed by the system.
Sent from my CM7 SCH-i500

I agree to an extent. I use the paid version of system panel to monitor apps like that from time to time. I use the stock task killer and do a level two kill after I have been on my phone switching between programs and such. And it does make a difference is performance. Depending on what you are dping depends on whether you should use one or not. I thinl the big depate is whether you should use an auto kill function. Its one thing to kill all task here and there to improve performance but another to have an app doing it every five or ten minutes. I think that's were the big battery drains happen. Anyway. To each there own and if they see it helps them in how there phone performs and are happy with the results, then maybe a task killer ia for them. For me. I just use the stock task manager and it works fine.
Tap-a-Talked from my Mesmerize

TweakStock 1.4 & kswapd0 lag - potential solution

I installed @dwitherell's TweakStock 1.4 on my Charge about 5 weeks ago, and I've mostly been happy with it. The one problem I kept running into was deteriorating performance over time, leading to frequent hard lockups requiring hard reboots. I'd gotten to the point where I needed to reboot the phone nearly every day. Having multiple active apps also tended to cause problems, for example Cardiotrainer + Rhapsody music.
Sometimes when the lag hit I was able to get a CPU usage report before the phone fully locked up. At such times I'd see kswapd0 eating a large portion of CPU. That suggested memory problems. I tried tweaking my OOM kill thresholds, to no avail.
This morning, based on some research, I took a look through my build.prop and noticed that this ROM's default VM heap size is a whopping 72MB. That sounded very high, compared to my previous phones where it was 24-32MB. I installed the VM Heap tool, knocked the heap size down to 48MB, and rebooted. My phone has been running as smooth as silk since, even with multiple simultaneously active apps running.
I'll keep watching to see how this holds up over time, but the difference even over a few hours is noticeable enough that I thought I'd report my findings right away. Regrettably, XDA discriminates against new members, so I can't post into the TweakStock developer thread as I would prefer. HTH!

thanks for the tip... just installed Eclipse, at its VM is 48MB.
tweakstock was running great for me though, so real problems like you said. my only problem (minor) was my Scrabble app being such a battery and data hog...

Thanks for the tip -- I had noticed this too, will give it a try. Though I'm on a different version of TweakStock I noticed the heap size is 72 here as well. Trying 48 for a while... will chime in if there's improvement.
- A

It is likely set high because it was found that increasing the VM heap size helped curb hot boots on heavily modified ROMs.

Interesting, thanks for the history @imnuts! I did encounter the hot boot issues some months back on earlier iterations of Gingerbread ROMs for the Charge. I will keep an eye out for hot boots to see if my 48Mb VM heap size is too low, or swap lag if it is still too high. Perhaps we will all have to try to find the best heap size for our usage patterns, as there may be no best one-size-fits-all setting.

Can't remember where, but I think I once read something that said 40 MB is the absolute best size to go with for a variety of reasons. For what that's worth...

Back on tweak stock.... can I just edit the build.prop or do I have to download VM heap?
Thanks!
tappin' that....

jco23 said:
Back on tweak stock.... can I just edit the build.prop or do I have to download VM heap?
Thanks!
tappin' that....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just set the value in the build.prop.

jco23 said:
Back on tweak stock.... can I just edit the build.prop or do I have to download VM heap?
Thanks!
tappin' that....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Only change back only when you have issue. I currently using 72m since day one and it's working fine, super fast launching apps.

Fwiw stock settings are 64

Was so thrilled to see this recommendation, as I observed that my phone is really struggling to memory, and then kswapd0 kicks in. Tried to change it to 48MB, then to 64MB. Did not see any improvements. It looks like all apps get pre-loaded into memory, and once free memory hits less than ~80MB, the phone becomes sluggish. Once I kill all apps, the phone is back to normal snappy lag-free operation. Free memory at that point is around 135MB. This is even worse when I insert the phone into car dock. Re-draw takes about 5-7 seconds, swiping is about 2-3 seconds. In few moments it becomes ok, but still laggy.

No problems here
Been on TS1.4 w/ PBJ for about a month now, everything is still as snappy as day one. Thought I was having issues at one point but it turned out it was actually an app, Stitcher Radio, that was eating CPU and draining battery (even though I never launched it). I've over/under clocked with SetCPU at various times but never messed with the voltages.
Nonetheless, thanks to OP for this little tidbit, I'll remember it if I ever start experiencing problems.

ddavv said:
Was so thrilled to see this recommendation, as I observed that my phone is really struggling to memory, and then kswapd0 kicks in. Tried to change it to 48MB, then to 64MB. Did not see any improvements. It looks like all apps get pre-loaded into memory, and once free memory hits less than ~80MB, the phone becomes sluggish. Once I kill all apps, the phone is back to normal snappy lag-free operation. Free memory at that point is around 135MB. This is even worse when I insert the phone into car dock. Re-draw takes about 5-7 seconds, swiping is about 2-3 seconds. In few moments it becomes ok, but still laggy.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
ddavv, sorry it didn't work for you. Some of the other things I've done to my Charge to help with the lag:
Changed io scheduler to bfq (from sio)
Tweaked my memory manager kill thresholds to 6,8,20,28,32,40 (WIP, YMMV!)
Removed some apps that kept heavy services in memory all the time, e.g. Accuweather & Lookout Security, and streaming media services I didn't use much (Last.fm, Slacker)
Turned off Google location services to stop the k3g_wq CPU runaway bug (this may be fixed in Google Maps > 6.4.0)
Switched to ADW.Launcher
Trimmed widgets I wasn't using frequently (down from 20 to 15)
I still do get a bit of lag after the phone has run for a while, so daily reboots are still a good idea for me - but I'm slowly improving my situation. I'm probably going to take a few hours to do a full wipe & reload once the FP1 ROMs start dropping, and be much more careful about indiscriminate app restoring from Titanium Backup this time. Good luck!

Weird changes in terms of speed

I've had my U11 (64/4 variant) for a month now. I'm satisfied with it in general, but I've noticed something really peculiar.
In the first days, my U11 was extremely snappy and fast (opening applications, opening the camera, unlocking the screen, and so forth). However, after using it for a week, I noticed a strange phenomenon: the general speed of my phone was changing all the time. I mean, sometimes, I had to wait approximately 2 seconds for Gmail to load & display my inbox, while sometimes I just tapped on Gmail and it loaded & displayed my inbox almost instantly. (No, Gmail wasn't in the RAM in the latter case...)
It's still happening and I'm not happy about it because I ditched my S7 due to Samsung's tacky and laggy TouchWiz (I heard that it had been renamed, but I don't really care). Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that SenseUI is laggy and tacky because I love it and I haven't even experienced a slight lag since I had this phone, but the unpredictable speed of my phone is irritating a little bit. By the way, the same goes for the camera (stock application): sometimes, it takes quite long for the camera to load & be ready, while sometimes it doesn't even take a second.
More than 90% of the storage is free and more than 50% of the RAM is free most of the time.
What do I do? Shall I perform a factory reset? As I've mentioned, I'm using the stock ROM and I want to do so in the future, too as I've got used to it.

Htc Boost+ app. If you dont have it get it. If you do have it then check the foreground and background restrictions.
If you're using any apps from 3rd parties that control apps and ram, remove them. Android has it's own app killer and boost+ will do the rest according to how you use the phone.
Signal clarity is also a huge player in the speed of today's devices. If you have a weak wifi or cell signal then the phone has to wait for the data transfer so server connections will suffer, hence why you experience intermittent slow loading.
The camera may take a while because of not being in background or if other apps are consuming resources. Also the more you use an app the quicker it should open as android 'should' hold the app in ram, if theres enough room.
Hope this helps clarify.

shivadow said:
Htc Boost+ app. If you dont have it get it. If you do have it then check the foreground and background restrictions.
If you're using any apps from 3rd parties that control apps and ram, remove them. Android has it's own app killer and boost+ will do the rest according to how you use the phone.
Signal clarity is also a huge player in the speed of today's devices. If you have a weak wifi or cell signal then the phone has to wait for the data transfer so server connections will suffer, hence why you experience intermittent slow loading.
The camera may take a while because of not being in background or if other apps are consuming resources. Also the more you use an app the quicker it should open as android 'should' hold the app in ram, if theres enough room.
Hope this helps clarify.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for your reply. I had already used the Boost+ before I posted this thread. I deleted a few apps that I hadn't really used, and now I don't have any problems with my phone as far as speed is concerned.

My Ongoing Battle with the G7 Power's Atrocious RAM Management

Hey all, I've had my G7 Power for about 2 years and in the last year or so I have been super frustrated with the handling of background processes, etc.
It can hardly hold a background process. The two worst offenders for me are:
It will kill my music app almost instantly after pausing. This is exceedingly frustrating when an app mutes all other audio and it instantly kills my music.
It will kill my browser when I go to search for a file to upload (for example if I go to upload a PDF to a website I can't because the website has to reload when I come back from finding the file).
In an attempt to solve this I moved from stock to LOS 18.1 and rooted. This was perhaps marginally better, but still overall terrible.
The other day I used this Magisk module to enable the low_ram flag, as well as disabled the Google app (which despite always always hogging RAM also loved to close in the background), which actually kinda solved my problem. It is still not perfect, and I had to find a new weather app, but it's acceptable. HOWEVER, I learned that I cannot use messages for web with this flag on (really Google????), which is kind of a dealbreaker for me.
I happily used stock ROMs on my phones for the last few years and would rather not spend my time making my phone with 3GB of RAM work worse than my older phones that ran MM on 1GB just fine. Any suggestions? Should I go back to Android 9 and never update? I can't even remember if it was better but it seems like it might be.