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Reddit: I stopped using a task killer to see if there's a difference. It's huge.
- generalk 16y agoThis is what I've always told folks who ask about my Nexus One's need for a task killer: "Never used one, no need." On the rare occasion that you do find an app that backgrounds incorrectly, uninstall it like any other buggy app. Everything else Just Works.
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- ZeroGravitas 16y agoHow do you identify the buggy app? My wife's Nexus One seems to be exhibiting the symptoms but obviously I don't get to observe it in general use to give me some intuition on what's causing the issue.
- nuclear_eclipse 16y agoSettings -> About phone -> Battery use This gives you an excellent display of what hardware and software components have used the most of your battery power. Take a look at the applications using the most battery, and you can either find apps that have inefficient background processes, or apps that are set to update their data too frequently. Edit: My current list: Display 41%, Cell Standby 28%, Phone idle 25%, Wi-Fi 8%; Everything else: peanuts.
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- snprbob86 16y agoAs an iPhone owner: I have no idea what a "task killer" is or why I would even consider using one... I'm a supporter of Android (I know many happy Android owners), but this post screams to me "Apple does the things they do for good reasons". EDIT: Sheesh. I had read the article. I was referring to keeping these sorts of things out of the app store. I'm familiar with the task model of the Android SDK and understand that this isn't a problem with Android, it is a problem with the open ecosystem. Open ecosystems are a good thing sometimes, and they are a bad thing sometimes.
- aphyr 16y agoThe point of the article is that on Android, you don't need to know what a task killer is either, since it's not necessary.
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- billybob 16y ago"Now, it’s true that there are task manager apps in the Android Market. But they are not necessary. The Android system doesn’t come with one and doesn’t need one... There are a lot of things I like better about the iPhone than Android. The multitasking architecture, however, has been an Android advantage, and iPhone OS 4, I think, will pretty much put them on equal footing in this regard. There are technical differences, but they’re small differences, not big ones." http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/mobile_multitasking http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/mobile_multitasking
- Karzyn 16y agoThe device that you own is irrelevant, a "task killer" kills tasks. If it were any more clear you'd be able to see through the phone. Additionally, the point of the post is that using the task killer is bad and that "Google does the things they do for good reasons". At no point does Apple even factor into the equation.
- troygoode 16y agoI'm a long time iPhone owner (just upgraded to 4 from my 3G two weeks ago) and just received a Droid X on Friday through work (my first Android phone); I'll be carrying both for the foreseeable future. I'm digging various aspects of the Droid, but WOW is it easy to end up with a ton of processes running on the thing - and it is very annoying to have to go over to my task killer frequently to shut them down. According to this article I've been "doing it wrong," so I'll let them all run freely for a while and see what is what. At the moment I think I prefer iOS 4's version of "almost-multitasking-sometimes", but we'll see how I feel after I get used to the 'droid way of doing things.
- aphyr 16y agoSadly, Verizon insists that a task killer is essential to maintain free memory. I've tried to convince them otherwise--watching the ADB logs should be sufficient to conclude that the memory manager is doing its job just fine--but no luck. I do keep white killer around for debugging my own lock-prone services, but I can't say I've ever needed it for a published app.
- Qz 16y agoThe pursuit of 'free memory' is one of those things that make me laugh, same as people complaining about programs that are CPU hogs. I mean, we're always after the best memory and the best CPU's only to end up running around feverishly making sure we use as little of it as possible.
- moultano 16y agoI think the motivation for this comes from people's personal experience with disk thrashing. On a desktop, getting to 100% memory usage is a big deal, because it means you're already using a lot of swap. They just haven't relearned their habits for systems without a platter.
- Qz 16y agoOh of course. It's just that the meaning gets disconnected from the message along the way. Disk thrashing happens when you get close to 100%, but people quickly simplify "don't let my memory get used up to 100%" into "don't let my memory get used up ever."
- masklinn 16y ago> On a desktop, getting to 100% memory usage is a big deal, because it means you're already using a lot of swap. But that's not even true for any OS more modern than Windows XP. Linux, Vista, 7 and OSX all keep huge amounts of data cached when you don't need the memory, just because they can and it's more efficient to restart stuff pulling half of it from RAM than re-reading everything from disk. My macbook currently shows 2.27GB Free out of 8GB RAM, but 2.27GB of those are marked as Inactive (they're cache holding old data which might yet be needed again), yielding a total of 5.73GB in active use. The rest can be reclaimed and reused at a moment's notice if need be.
- peng 16y agoFrom the title, I thought this was going to be about blocking Reddit to improve productivity.
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- emehrkay 16y agoI get a lot of work done when reddit goes down. Happened today with the read-only mode -- who wants to do that?
- code_duck 16y agoI simply added 127.0.0.1 reddit.com www.reddit.com to my /etc/hosts on the machines I use for working.
- m_eiman 16y agoI'm not sure that spending your time on HN instead is much of an improvement.
- code_duck 16y agoOh, the content here is far more informative and useful! But you're right, I've done the same with this site from time to time...
- plorkyeran 16y agoAt least it's lower volume.
- pilif 16y agoand more worthy of your time due to being higher quality (this post excluded)
- jsz0 16y agoI have the completely opposite experience on my HTC Eris. If I don't use a task killer I get lag problems (especially with dialer delay) It becomes unbearable after a couple of days. Everything is perfect a few seconds after a trip to ATK. I'm not sure if this is a resource management problem or just a bug in the HTC Sense apps.
- mivok 16y agoMy wife's phone (Eris) has the exact same issues. I put a task killer on, and immediately the lag issues were reduced. I've just tried switching from Sense to the stock home app and removing the task killer to see if it would help. Interestingly my own phone (Droid) has never had any issues and works fine without any task killer apps.
- pbz 16y agoUp until Froyo (2.2) I had to kill tasks every now and then (or simply reboot) because it was slowing down to a crawl. All the animations were getting choppy, took a lot longer for applications to start, and so on. I guess they fixed or tweaked something in 2.2 because for the past moth I didn't have to kill anything yet; I have the same apps as before. Unfortunately they also broke some stuff in FRF91 (oddly enough FRF83 was better / more stable for me...)
- starnix17 16y agoThe sad thing about task killers is how many "normal" people will end up using them because some salesperson for carrier X has told them to do so. Go to a Verizon store and look at their Android phones, I bet most of them have a task killer running.
- timtadh 16y agoSo true, I only installed one because it was one of the demo apps the CSR installed on my phone to explain how the app store works. I used it occasionally and then realized it was pointless.
- seldo 16y agoI'm not trying to be an Apple fanboy here, but this is sort of an interesting example of what happens when you give your users more information about the system than they need. People see these stats and make incorrect assumptions about what they mean. iPhone on the other hand doesn't give you this information, so people ignore it, which works out fine.
- Ysx 16y agoAndroid doesn't show this as standard. You need a third-party app to show memory usage or kill processes.
- varikin 16y agoYou can kill processes with standard Android, but it is buried under the system settings under applications or something like that. I don't know about memory usage though.
- pilif 16y agointerestingly enough, with the advent of OS4 bugs in various 3rd party applications become much more visible. Skype for example sucks 20% of my 3GS (1 year old) battery per hour if it's running in the background. Even if it might look really cool, the task manager functionality of the iphone is really badly discoverable (I've had coworkers ask me how to fix their battery drain, not knowing how to kill tasks) and clunky to use if you need to regularly quit application (which you do with skype). I guess it's my fault though - I wanted multitasking for Skype and now that I have it, I don't want it any more.
- axod 16y agoI wonder how many install anti-virus apps. You could probably make a fair bit selling anti-virus/firewall/anti-spyware apps for the uneducated. I have a N1 and have never seen the need for a task killer. Quite odd that people would install one.
- Locke1689 16y agoI'm sorry, and I don't mean to whine, but I don't think this is really HN material. Pretty much everyone who's used a spinlock instead of a semaphore knows that a context switch can be more expensive than the alternatives. For a nontechnical audience (Reddit, nowadays), this may be original, but I hope it's not so revolutionary for most of us.
- eli 16y agoReminds me of John C Dvorak complaining that Windows' "Idle Process" was eating up all his CPU time. Sometimes a little information is dangerous.
- jacquesm 16y agoSomeone should profile that and optimise it, think about how much more efficient those machines would all be.
- pilif 16y agoThis in turn reminds me of an april fools joke in the german c't magazine where they've shown this software of theirs that puts an end to the huge CPU load of the idle process. Unfortunately, the article doesn't seem to be available online.
- Indyan 16y agoI use a task killer as not all apps are that obedient. The gameloft games won't die when running in background. They continue to consume a whole lot of resources. Ideally we shouldn't need a task killer. Unfortunately, real world has lots of clumsy programmers.