Database Develop

Does keeping your home app in memory drain more battery?

I don't know if it's me or setting "Home app in memory" on CM drains waaay more battery.
I have 1600 mAh battery that usually lasts 8 AM to midnight and still has 20-30% left. Whereas when I set my phone to keep home app in memory, the battery is under 50% before noon.

It sure will!
And this is why:
When you run a new program and the memory is filled, things need to be dumped from ram to make space.
The home application ONLY needs to be run while you are on the desktop -- it doesn't actually do anything when you have some other application in the foreground. If you force it to stay loaded in memory, then other things (background processes) will get dumped from memory instead -- things that need to be running more or less all the time. So what happens when you force the home application to stay in memory, is that these background processes get into a crazy cycle of constantly trying to RELOAD. Maybe bumping some other stuff out of memory to do so, causing those other things to get into constantly trying to reload. In other words, it causes a much higher CPU load and eats up your batter.

Makes sense, but is there anything that could help, like enabling compcache or swap?

lbcoder said:
It sure will!
And this is why:
When you run a new program and the memory is filled, things need to be dumped from ram to make space.
The home application ONLY needs to be run while you are on the desktop -- it doesn't actually do anything when you have some other application in the foreground. If you force it to stay loaded in memory, then other things (background processes) will get dumped from memory instead -- things that need to be running more or less all the time. So what happens when you force the home application to stay in memory, is that these background processes get into a crazy cycle of constantly trying to RELOAD. Maybe bumping some other stuff out of memory to do so, causing those other things to get into constantly trying to reload. In other words, it causes a much higher CPU load and eats up your batter.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Wow...great explanation. Thanks! I'll disable this setting then.

Neejay said:
Wow...great explanation. Thanks! I'll disable this setting then.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's a trade-off. For me returning to the home from any app is way to slow unless I have that feature enabled.
Maybe it's because I have a widget and 8 icons on the main screen?

I have 2 widgets and 4 icons on home screen (total of 7 widgets and 25 icons on 5 screens) so for me disabling "keep home in memory" is not even an option lol

Even just having a lot of applications installed will make it take longer for launcher to start up.... it has to scan through all the programs installed, figure out what icon to use (and deal with it), figure out what name to use, build the menu, etc., etc., etc.

wheres the option for this?

You can find it in Spare Parts app on several ROMs (I use CM).

[Q] One of these apps is killing my battery, which one?

I got a new Captivate a couple weeks ago now. Since then my battery life has been less than 12 hours on stock 2.1, stock 2.2, Paragon RC6 and Serendipity 5.12.
Yesterday I decided to wipe the phone and start off with stock apps then slowly add them back in each day. So far, I'm 5 hours unplugged and still have 86% battery (stock apps) after using some GPS, some WiFi, 3 phone calls for a total of about 20 minutes, some browsing and some text messaging. THIS IS HOW THE PHONE SHOULD BE WORKING. Therefore, one of the apps I normally have installed is being an asshole. However, this is going to take me forever to slowly add each one back in and monitor them to see what is killing my battery.
Does anyone have an idea of what it might be from the following (I didn't list what comes on the default Serendipity ROM because it obviously isn't anything already on it):
3G Watchdog
Adobe Reader
Advanced Task Killer
Angry Birds
AppBrain Market
Barcode Scanner
Beautiful Widgets
BLN Control
Cineplex Mobile
ConvertPad
Documents To Go
Dropbox
Google Earth
Evernote
Facebook
GasBuddy
Google Goggles
Google Sky Map
Google Translate
GPS Test
KeePassDroid
Lookout
Mint.com
Rogers My Account
Google Reader (not setup to sync)
ShootMe
Google Shopper
Skype
SoundHound
Spaghetti Marshmallo
Spare Parts
Tip Calculator
Titanium Backup
Twitter
Unblock Me

morrty said:
*3G Watchdog
Advanced Task Killer
*AppBrain Market
Google Earth
*Facebook
Google Goggles
Google Sky Map
*Lookout
Google Shopper
*Skype
*Twitter
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
*=Suspicious. Any of these could be the culprit(s) since they access the internet/network, but ones like Twitter and Facebook that update regularly are most suspect.

Do you keep skype connected? I would imagine it would use a lot of power if left connected.
What is your refresh interval set for in facebook?
Have you made sure to flash or reset with a full battery? The first time i did a factory reset, i did it with a half battery and my captivate would only last about 6h with light usage. After resetting with a full battery I could go 14-16 hours with similar usage.
Another issue ive seen is if you are in a low signal area that can also cause higher battery drain.

I'd suggest installing osmonitor from market and see what apps are running and eating up resources.
I previously had appbrain issues where it was running constantly at 5-10% of the cpu's resources but just uninstalled and reinstalled and all seems ok now. ymmv...
sent from my captivate using the xda app

Miami_Son said:
*3G Watchdog
Advanced Task Killer
*AppBrain Market
Google Earth
*Facebook
Google Goggles
Google Sky Map
*Lookout
Google Shopper
*Skype
*Twitter
*=Suspicious. Any of these could be the culprit(s) since they access the internet/network, but ones like Twitter and Facebook that update regularly are most suspect.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
ones in red definatly, blue meh... with the built in memory management/ tweaked management in updated newer/custom roms, task killers use more power than they save.
Android has their own online market with push installs now. AppBrain not needed. https://market.android.com/
destrorox said:
I'd suggest installing osmonitor from market and see what apps are running and eating up resources.
I previously had appbrain issues where it was running constantly at 5-10% of the cpu's resources but just uninstalled and reinstalled and all seems ok now. ymmv...
sent from my captivate using the xda app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
see above...

The blue ones could also be battery vampires because they access the network/wifi. Depends on how often they are set to sync data.

Thanks for the suggestions, I think what I'll do first is install everything that isn't suspicious from what you guys advised against and monitor that. Then I'll slowly add back the suspicious apps.
By the way, I'm going on 12 hours now and only at 74%. Usually my phone would be dead by now. This is with moderate use too. I just got off an hour long phone call with my brother after we both put our phones in speaker phone mode and owned kids on Black Ops.

don't forget beautiful widgets. stock setting were to update weather every 15 min. that is a lot of data over the course of a full day.
i found that one would kill my battery.

Tenchuu said:
don't forget beautiful widgets. stock setting were to update weather every 15 min. that is a lot of data over the course of a full day.
i found that one would kill my battery.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1
weather apps are battery killers. I uninstalled mine and went from 10hours to two days between charges.

@morrty, be sure to let us know your results.

I definitely will, it just may be a little while because I'm calibrating the battery by doing a full run down and full charge. I'm actually having a hard time running down the battery now.
Currently sitting at 45% @ 29 hours.
Incredible, I can't wait to single out that asshole app.

So far, I've installed all of the non suspicious apps. My battery started draining a little bit faster but not to the point it was before. It still seems like normal use. 7% drain overnight. 4% more since waking up, showering and coming to work.
Latitude was a huge offender I found. Even with the auto check-in disabled, it kept the phone in a partial wake-lock.
I've still got more testing to do but I'll update when I find out more.

Looks like it was a mix of facebook, twitter, latitude and dropbox.
Thanks for the help guys.

Apps Performance issue

Hello evry one. I have problem in my captivate and other models of android. I installed almost every custom rom but problem of loading apps fast still exist. What i mean is.. that when i on my mobile, so first time apps like calender, messenging etc take a little time to load. than when i close the app and open again, it loads very quickly. When mobile goes to standby for more than 10 mins, and when i on it, it again take little time to load apps, and widget menu etc.
Why it is like that ??? and whats the solution to always load the apps quickly

majidshahab091 said:
Hello evry one. I have problem in my captivate and other models of android. I installed almost every custom rom but problem of loading apps fast still exist. What i mean is.. that when i on my mobile, so first time apps like calender, messenging etc take a little time to load. than when i close the app and open again, it loads very quickly. When mobile goes to standby for more than 10 mins, and when i on it, it again take little time to load apps, and widget menu etc.
Why it is like that ??? and whats the solution to always load the apps quickly
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's how Android manages memory. It keeps your apps in memory until it needs to free some, at which point it starts to close apps to free some up. If they're already in memory they open fast because they're already open. If they aren't, they open more slowly.
There's not a ton you can do, really. Some 3rd party sms apps let you lock the app in memory, but I honestly never checked to see if it really works or not.
Personally, I restart my phone every morning when I wake up. This frees up the most memory and allows your phone to leave more apps open before closing them.

make sure you arent running any ****ty task killers.

You could flash an I9000 ROM/kernel that let's you tweak the lmk. (low memory killer)
Talon and semaphore both offer that option.
The trick is to make it weak enough to not kill the apps you want, but aggressive enough to not allow to run out of ram completely.
both of those kernels also have a "bigmem" version that gives the user a bit more ram at the cost of being able to record video in 720p.

studacris said:
You could flash an I9000 ROM/kernel that let's you tweak the lmk. (low memory killer)
Talon and semaphore both offer that option.
The trick is to make it weak enough to not kill the apps you want, but aggressive enough to not allow to run out of ram completely.
both of those kernels also have a "bigmem" version that gives the user a bit more ram at the cost of being able to record video in 720p.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I like ur answrr. But can u pls guide me abt lmk. I like this idea but never use such tweaks. I m using talon kernel right now and rom is much fast. But have same prb of apps loading

In the app memory freak, that installed with the kernel, there is a slider for you to adjust,
lower number the more aggressive the lmk but the better the overall performance.
Higher number is less aggressive and is better for multitasking, but can be a bit slower.

studacris said:
In the app memory freak, that installed with the kernel, there is a slider for you to adjust,
lower number the more aggressive the lmk but the better the overall performance.
Higher number is less aggressive and is better for multitasking, but can be a bit slower.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Where to find app memory freak ? i haven't seen any option in CWM

Should have been installed when you flashed talon. If not, it should be linked in the talon op.

Samsung Galaxy S mysterious ram usage cm10.1

Hey there, this problem might have been discussed before but I wasn't able to find it, so the problem is with ram usasage, I once went to the apps in settings and on the running apps I always see 250mb+ ram used by something, then I killed all the apps, but that just made a dliference of 50mb ram, It's real anoying because when I want to switch between apps it's slow and when I turn a browser back on after using aother app the page realoads which I guess wpuldn't happen with 300 mb ram, does anyone know the reason for this, I am currently running cm10.1.
Thanks!

ltkipras said:
Hey there, this problem might have been discussed before but I wasn't able to find it, so the problem is with ram usasage, I once went to the apps in settings and on the running apps I always see 250mb+ ram used by something, then I killed all the apps, but that just made a dliference of 50mb ram, It's real anoying because when I want to switch between apps it's slow and when I turn a browser back on after using aother app the page realoads which I guess wpuldn't happen with 300 mb ram, does anyone know the reason for this, I am currently running cm10.1.
Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What ROM and Kernel are you using?

Mango Polo said:
What ROM and Kernel are you using?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
ROM; cm10.1 nigtly 20130330 galaxysmtd Kernel: 3.0.70-g7b668b [email protected] #1

Free RAM is useless. It just sits there sucking up power and being available in case you need it. It's pretty much a waste to have 300 MB of RAM and then only use 100 MB. Instead you should try to keep your RAM full at all times with the things you are likely to need in the near future. For example, if your phone is currently only using 20% of your RAM but already caches the browser in case you'll use it soon it will be faster to load the browser. If you decide to use the music player on the other hand the cached browser can be overwritten with the music player without requiring any additional time, so no harm is done.
Modern systems don't have "free" and "in use" RAM, they have "free" (wasted space), "in use" and "cached". You shouldn't look at the amount of free RAM but rather the amount of actually used RAM is a better indicator.
The reason you only gain 50 MB when you kill all apps is because only 50 MB will be actually in use by apps and all remaining unused space is used for caching things. If your phone is slow, this is not the cause of it. You may just have a slow phone or the ROM might be slow for some (other) reason.

Marshian said:
Free RAM is useless. It just sits there sucking up power and being available in case you need it. It's pretty much a waste to have 300 MB of RAM and then only use 100 MB. Instead you should try to keep your RAM full at all times with the things you are likely to need in the near future. For example, if your phone is currently only using 20% of your RAM but already caches the browser in case you'll use it soon it will be faster to load the browser. If you decide to use the music player on the other hand the cached browser can be overwritten with the music player without requiring any additional time, so no harm is done.
Modern systems don't have "free" and "in use" RAM, they have "free" (wasted space), "in use" and "cached". You shouldn't look at the amount of free RAM but rather the amount of actually used RAM is a better indicator.
The reason you only gain 50 MB when you kill all apps is because only 50 MB will be actually in use by apps and all remaining unused space is used for caching things. If your phone is slow, this is not the cause of it. You may just have a slow phone or the ROM might be slow for some (other) reason.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yeah only 50mb is used to keep the apps running, but it probably takes up a whole lot more when using the apps, and this is a problem for me that it is slow to change between apps, and when I do change between the for example if I wanna text some one back while using a browser, once i turn the browser back on it restarts the page, and that didn't happen in my zte blade, unless I had some more apps running.
I wanna know what is using those 250+mb of ram!

ltkipras said:
yeah only 50mb is used to keep the apps running, but it probably takes up a whole lot more when using the apps, and this is a problem for me that it is slow to change between apps, and when I do change between the for example if I wanna text some one back while using a browser, once i turn the browser back on it restarts the page, and that didn't happen in my zte blade, unless I had some more apps running.
I wanna know what is using those 250+mb of ram!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
see exchange service,any svn services n keep track of system usage. normally 100mb+ will be taken for ui, framework...etc.
but. eventhough u keep track of it,then slaughter it, it will come back to life n running, so i wouldnt recommend slaughtering system usage.
switching between app normally slow for full or stock rom. try find some debloated rom. it will be suitable for u if u wanna more free ram rather than liquidity.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using xda app-developers app

I also observed some sluggishness after some time of usage. Sometimes the phone got totally unresponsive, not catching any push events (from buttons or screen), so that I couldn't even wake it after the screen timeout. I had to wait even few minutes before it was alive again.
Google Chrome was the most ram-eating app as far as I know.
Sometimes the best method is just restart your phone from time to time or even make a wipe - this is normal for all low-end android phones as they get sluggish after some time.
Long story short: I ended up buying a new phone with 2gb of RAM

pawci0 said:
I also observed some sluggishness after some time of usage. Sometimes the phone got totally unresponsive, not catching any push events (from buttons or screen), so that I couldn't even wake it after the screen timeout. I had to wait even few minutes before it was alive again.
Google Chrome was the most ram-eating app as far as I know.
Sometimes the best method is just restart your phone from time to time or even make a wipe - this is normal for all low-end android phones as they get sluggish after some time.
Long story short: I ended up buying a new phone with 2gb of RAM
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
well...good luck on ur new fone
wish i had extra money to buy one......
but, bigger ram doesnt solve anything as far as i know.stock gapps n app from firmware will be da 'pacman' here. unless ur obtain 'god mode' for ur fone.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using xda app-developers app

I have the same issue
I'm using CM10.1 RC5, kernel 3.0.76-gc0a8d45 [email protected] #1
I have same symptoms pawci0 and ltkipras mentioned.
But I don't want to buy a new phone...
The lack of memory is noticeable when I run Waze or maps . It just opens for a couple of minutes and closes by itself or rather hangs the entire device.
What should I do? Go for the CM10.1 stable, try a different ROM (i.e. Slim). Change kernels?

nope, waze doesnt use that much ram, try to fix permission first n clear cache in recovery
n try to use other kernel, mine ok with multitask, rather heavy with online games n hearing mp3 n receiving whatsapp, line n we chat at da same time
n try greenify app to control app thats always running.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using xda premium

Just try a other rom or kernel you would be amazed how lets say a change of kernel can speed things up. The point is everyone uses their phone differently different apps and things so you need to find the rom that suits you mostly.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using xda app-developers app

[Q] Trouble with RAM management?

I got my Xperia Z1 about a month ago, and I've noticed some issues with RAM management (or possibly under-optimized third-party apps). Although I haven't had much luck in replicating the problem, I noticed it happen a few times after a Firefox internet session, or after playing a graphically intensive game like Dead Trigger 2. The app would either close by itself (not crash, as in, there were no error messages), or, after I'd close it, I'd notice my launcher (Nova Launcher Prime) go into a restart loop. A quick glance at the running apps section in settings shows 50-100 MB of free ram, and all "constantly running" apps (launcher, viber, zooper widget, k9-mail, swiftkey, tasker, etc.) stuck, for want of a better phrase, in a restarting loop (due to lack of ram I guess).
I tried running Fast Reboot (a task killer) to see if I could regain stability of the system, but it kills only a few system tasks, freeing up to a measly 50 MB of RAM, which makes me wonder (in aggravation) just where the RAM is being used. The only way the running apps would stop closing and restarting (and I need the launcher stable) is to reboot. I'm not sure if the system would stabilize after x minutes, as I only waited for a minute or two before rebooting so that I could open another app/game.
I'm not trying to start yet another debate on necessity of used RAM on Android and efficiency/futility of task managers/killers, but what I described above really seems like poor RAM management to me. I've had a few android devices in the past, and experienced various problems /errors, but never something like this.
Has anybody had a similar issue, or have any tips?
My Xperia Z1 C6903 is currently running on rooted stock 14.2.A.0.290

Although i dont get force closes, but ive noticed most of the ram is taken by the phone itself, right now for me it says i have 1.1gb in use, when i close everything i have just a slight (barely even noticeable) increase in free ram, when i click on cached processes and close all one by one ive seen it increases the ram use instead of decreasing it?
But, do you use apps like setcpu? You can keep it on performance and keep the min slider to the lowest and the max slider to max, it runs stable and gives you performance when you need it, and no performance when you dont need it.
If all fails, try deleting system apps that you barely even use or need... Becareful what you delete tho!

mobzw995 said:
Although i dont get force closes, but ive noticed most of the ram is taken by the phone itself, right now for me it says i have 1.1gb in use, when i close everything i have just a slight (barely even noticeable) increase in free ram, when i click on cached processes and close all one by one ive seen it increases the ram use instead of decreasing it?
But, do you use apps like setcpu? You can keep it on performance and keep the min slider to the lowest and the max slider to max, it runs stable and gives you performance when you need it, and no performance when you dont need it.
If all fails, try deleting system apps that you barely even use or need... Becareful what you delete tho!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the reply. No, I've used apps like that in the past, but haven't installed anything similar on the Z1, because I noticed in BetterBatteryStats that the CPU speed goes down often when the screen is off, and up when, I suppose, it's required, such as in intensive games...

What apps do you use? For example facebook, YouTube, browser etc
Ive checked again on my cached apps and to my surprise, AOSP browser takes up 208mb!
Facebook takes up 48mb, and youtube takes up 22mb.
It just depends on the apps you have installed, some use the ram even while the phone is asleep.
Ive stopped those and a huge difference was made on freeing up my ram!
What i dont get is tho why sony advertises 2.2ghz quadcore if the phone itself takes most of it?
Just delete the apps you dont need from "all apps".