Background apps always get killed - Xperia Z1 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

Hi,
I recently noticed that background apps get killed very quickly.
It is definitly not like on my Nexus 4 or Nexus 7 that also have 2gb RAM, even the really small and simple apps get killed and often only 1 app (like google music) is still kept in ram.
Stamina mode on/off does not seem to have any influence on it.
I would appreciate help in solving this. Are there any suitable system logs (phone is rooted), a developer option or an app that can help me find the source of the problem?
Thanks for help

Related

Apps automatically starting up, by themselves

Hello all,
I recently bought my N1 about 4 days ago. So far its been great. Easily one of the best phones I've ever owned. However, I am having this problem where apps in android seem to startup by themselves. I'm using Advanced Task killer to kill em but ill kill them and then like a minute later they're back up and running without me starting them. Its quite annoying as my battery is taking a beating from it having to close and open apps and repeat. The biggest offenders of this are the voice apps such as voice search, voice dialer, Google voice (which isn't even setup), and the amazon mp3 store. A few third party apps I downloaded tend to do this as well.
Have any of you guys experienced this? Is there any way to fix it? Thanks in advance! XD
Sent from my Nexus One using XDA App
decoyjoe said:
Hello all,
I recently bought my N1 about 4 days ago. So far its been great. Easily one of the best phones I've ever owned. However, I am having this problem where apps in android seem to startup by themselves. I'm using Advanced Task killer to kill em but ill kill them and then like a minute later they're back up and running without me starting them. Its quite annoying as my battery is taking a beating from it having to close and open apps and repeat. The biggest offenders of this are the voice apps such as voice search, voice dialer, Google voice (which isn't even setup), and the amazon mp3 store. A few third party apps I downloaded tend to do this as well.
Have any of you guys experienced this? Is there any way to fix it? Thanks in advance! XD
Sent from my Nexus One using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Do not worry about app running in the background, what you are probably seeing is the list of what was run, Android is verry good at managing memory, in fact I do not even use a task manager and I am fine with it.
Well that's the thing. Some of these apps that startup I have never run such as the mp3 store. So I close it and I get an additional 10megs of memory. But then it just starts back up. So I don't know how to stop it all together.
Sent from my Nexus One using XDA App
There are apps that automatically run in the background but don't effect performance like Google voice voice dialer etc..what I did was add them to the ignore list. Trust me those apps are always running no matter how many times you close them
Sent from my Nexus One using XDA App
Like has already been said, stop worrying about it. Those apps are NOT stealing memory, they're NOT using battery.
Free memory does not benefit you. Android will automatically load apps in to memory so that they are available to switch to fast as possible.
You should not kill apps unless they are bisbehaving. Killing off apps forces Android to load them back into memory if its algorithm thinks you are likely to use it. The act of loading data into memory uses power and Android tries hard to avoid it.
I was obsessed with managing my memory and running apps when I bought my nexus one. Everyone at that time suggested task killers so I got one of those. I had crappy performance with random sluggishness. I figured I just needed to kill off more apps. Eventually I read an article from an Android dev explaining this stuff and I backed off and have had a much better experience since.
I wish Google was more vocal on this subject. Everyone thinking auto task killing is a necessity on Android really gives it a black eye.
Sent from my Nexus One using XDA App
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=712352
Jack_R1 said:
...
2) App that loses focus goes to background. That's the way OS is built. If you want apps to be killed on losing focus, get iOS 3 to run on your device.
3) The market has task killers because they can be written for multitasking OS, and because they help dealing with bad apps. Not for any other reason.
4) The OS loads some of your most used tasks when it runs, even if you don't know about it. Just loads in the memory, and allocates no CPU time. If you leave your phone unattended, your free memory goes down by itself. Why? Because free memory is wasted memory. You can check the "EMPTY" processes in Astro, for example.
5) The best task killer is careful selection of your apps. You see hangups? Find out the app that's doing it and remove it, or kill it specifically after running if it's necessary.
...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=678205
Remove your task killer (or, if you insist, just clear the auto-kill list), erase all you think you know about memory management - because you don't know - and stop worrying.

[Q] Apps kept coming back after autokill -> memory leak -> lag

Hi all,
1. I've got these applications (Smartone-Vodophone SV app, 5 days weather, google map, social hub and such) that would keep coming back, relaunching themselves even after I put them onto my task manager's autokill list. Seems like they would wait around for me to enable the wifi/3G connection and then launch themselves. I even installed other apps to disable autolaunch and they would still launch themselves in the background every now and then. I had to kill them every time I unlocked my screen and these "launching and killing" cycles eventually depleted my memory down to below 100MB, making the lag situation even worse. Does anyone know how I can stop them from launching, without having to uninstall these apps?
2. I haven't installed the lagfix and I understand that the fix has to do with reformatting the apps' partition with a faster file system to reduce the lag (probably by giving it faster I/O access to the program's binaries?) I'm still waiting for Froyo, which should be out in a couple of weeks in my country. Does anyone know if Froyo would take care of this file system problem? Even with the Froyo or one-click lag fix, it still would not solve the apps launching and memory leak problem, right?
3. I notice that after I've installed more apps, the lag situation got worse. I was playing some songs on the external SD cards and it choked once in a while. I made sure I killed all the other apps and that I still got 100+MB to run just this one song player app and yet it would still choke. This tells me that the lag has nothing to do with available memory. And the player app was stock that came with the phone so there shouldn't be any fragmentation issue (apps installed later might have?) that makes it run slow. And if its the bad file system, this app, running all by itself, should have all the I/O bandwidth to itself so the access to the app's binaries should not have any lag... and neither should the access to the songs on the external SD card. So what exactly is causing the lag then? I don't see how the lagfix would solve this problem either. I actually have read that the lags would come back after a period of usage even with the lagfix. Anyone got an insight to this problem? What exactly is causing the lag? and why installing more apps seem to make it worse? and would Froyo be able to fix all these problems?
Thanks a lot.
@boarder838
I think you really need to read a lot more about just how Android works as you seem to have some strange ideas about how it works.
To start with you need to realise that having 200mb or 100mb of free Ram makes zero difference to performance only when you have no free Ram is it a problem and even then the system will sort it out for you by closing the least used program. Free Ram is just wasted Ram as it's not doing anything and will not make your device respond or work faster using a Auto Task Killer is wasting your battery and slowing down your device not speeding it up and saving battery as you seem to think. As i have pointed out above stop obsessing over your free Ram amount as unless you have none its not a problem stop using a Task Killer and you will most probably see your device responds faster as its not constantly killing things and just leaves them open doing nothing in the back ground which doesn't use Ram or Battery so just leave them be.
Yes Froyo will bring many improvements to our devices but won't fix a problem that doesn't exist re memory leaks and apps launching that you seem to think you have. I don't know but some of those apps may be system apps that need to run all the time which is why they keep relaunching. As for a lag fix well that's what we are all hoping for but if not I'm pretty sure the great people of this forum will come up with an easy to apply fix to it.
I have absolutely no problem playing Music or even streaming it over Bluetooth no lag stutters or break ups at all although my Music is on the Internal SD card. Maybe you should look at the quality that you have encoded your Music in as that may be causing problem. maybe some of the apps you have installed are also causing a problem but its impossible to know as we all install different apps and have different set ups.
I don't know how much experience you have with Android devices or flashing Roms but if you read enough and understand it you have the possibility to flash custom Rom's and various tweaks and fixes to make your device how you want it. That's part of the beauty of Android but don't rush into anything you are not sure about as you can end up with an expensive brick so read things many times and make sure you understand step by step what you are doing if you are going to attempt any of these things.
If you look at my signature you will see i am running a Custom Rom that includes a lag fix and various other tweaks it also allowed me to remove some of the programs in the official Rom that i didn't want or need. For me my device runs nice and smooth and fast of course I'm looking forward to Froyo and all the improvements that will bring but I'm quite happy with my Galaxy S the way it is now. Oh and this is my second Android device and I've never used a Task Killer never mind an Auto Task Killer and have never seen an out of Ram message either.
Marc
exactly what he said ^
Hi Marc,
Thanks for spending time to read through my long post and reply to it. I probably didn't explain my problem clearly in my post.
There were a couple of reasons I wanted to kill/stop the apps from starting:
1. Even before I installed any of those apps killer, I noticed that the available memory kept going down after a couple days of usage and it went down to below 100M. I figured some of the apps would need 10's of MB to run so I thought I should at least keep 100MB around so that it wouldn't run out of memory and start swapping when I start those apps. I don't know enough about Android but I assume its just like linux or other OS, when it runs out of physical memory, it would start swapping and slow things down. Even after I started using task killer and killed all the other tasks, the memory level would still not recover. That seems to point to a memory leak problem but using "Memory Booster" to do garbage collection seems to help. Still, it would be nice to be able to stop them from launching in the first place. <-- my first question.
2. I do not want any jobs/processes/apps that I don't need to run in the background to drain my battery. I don't think I can say for sure that those apps are all just idling and not using much CPU/battery. There are quite a few of them so if each of them use some CPU time/battery, it will add up eventually. Note that these are not system processes (or daemons as in unix's init.d). They are crappy apps from the cellular provider so I'm pretty sure they don't have to be running (they're probably just collecting my personal data or smth). I just thought there would be a way to stop them from launching without uninstalling them.
Thanks for answering my question regarding Froyo. If they would do the filesystem lagfix then I'll just wait for that update.
As for the music stuttering problem, my songs are on the external SD card but my old Nokia E85 phone has no problem playing with those songs on the same SD card. As I have pointed out in my last question, I was only running one app and with plenty of memory so it had nothing to do with available memory. I also suggested that however bad the filesystem was, the I/O bandwidth should still be enough to run this one music player app (access the program binary/libraries?) and to retrieve data from external SD card to play the music smoothly. So applying the lagfix probably won't help this problem though I still haven't tried the lagfix. Now I'm thinking that one of the task killer might be killing some system processes which were needed by the music player. I probably should uninstall all these task killers and see if it would help.
I have gotten the phone for only a couple of weeks so I haven't gotten around to try flashing different roms or rooting my phone. There's so much info scattered around on the web and I can't seem to find a source that really has the authority or complete information. I'll see if I have time later to look into all the tweaks and such but for now its just a phone to me and I just want it to run smoothly without having to spend too much effort to tune it.
Don't get me wrong. I still love the flexibility and customization opportunities provided by the Android platform and I just love to show off my "Beautiful Weather Widget", "Live Aquarium Wall Paper" and my cool 3D scrolling "Launcher Pro" to my iphone4 buddies and make them drool.
Thanks for you comment and let's hope Froyo will bring us a smooth running and stable platform.
Dogmann said:
@boarder838
I think you really need to read a lot more about just how Android works as you seem to have some strange ideas about how it works.
To start with you need to realise that having 200mb or 100mb of free Ram makes zero difference to performance only when you have no free Ram is it a problem and even then the system will sort it out for you by closing the least used program. Free Ram is just wasted Ram as it's not doing anything and will not make your device respond or work faster using a Auto Task Killer is wasting your battery and slowing down your device not speeding it up and saving battery as you seem to think. As i have pointed out above stop obsessing over your free Ram amount as unless you have none its not a problem stop using a Task Killer and you will most probably see your device responds faster as its not constantly killing things and just leaves them open doing nothing in the back ground which doesn't use Ram or Battery so just leave them be.
Yes Froyo will bring many improvements to our devices but won't fix a problem that doesn't exist re memory leaks and apps launching that you seem to think you have. I don't know but some of those apps may be system apps that need to run all the time which is why they keep relaunching. As for a lag fix well that's what we are all hoping for but if not I'm pretty sure the great people of this forum will come up with an easy to apply fix to it.
I have absolutely no problem playing Music or even streaming it over Bluetooth no lag stutters or break ups at all although my Music is on the Internal SD card. Maybe you should look at the quality that you have encoded your Music in as that may be causing problem. maybe some of the apps you have installed are also causing a problem but its impossible to know as we all install different apps and have different set ups.
I don't know how much experience you have with Android devices or flashing Roms but if you read enough and understand it you have the possibility to flash custom Rom's and various tweaks and fixes to make your device how you want it. That's part of the beauty of Android but don't rush into anything you are not sure about as you can end up with an expensive brick so read things many times and make sure you understand step by step what you are doing if you are going to attempt any of these things.
If you look at my signature you will see i am running a Custom Rom that includes a lag fix and various other tweaks it also allowed me to remove some of the programs in the official Rom that i didn't want or need. For me my device runs nice and smooth and fast of course I'm looking forward to Froyo and all the improvements that will bring but I'm quite happy with my Galaxy S the way it is now. Oh and this is my second Android device and I've never used a Task Killer never mind an Auto Task Killer and have never seen an out of Ram message either.
Marc
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Oh I found the problem with stuttering music. It was the "beautiful weather widget"! I tried removing all the task killers and aquarium etc and it still wouldn't work. As soon as I removed the weather widget there was no problem with music playback anymore. Anyone has the same problem that pretty weather widget?? I've already set the refresh period to every 3 hours but it still wouldn't help?!

[Request] Process manager/Task manager

I am wondering if we have a task manager/process explorer app for Nexus 4? Currently I am using AirDroid v2 that includes a task manager, but I am looking for one with more options.
I travel a lot & would like to kill as much unwanted applications running in the background as possible to conserve battery.
There is no more need to use task killer to manage android systems any more. You will be doing more harm than good, in fact there is no good in killing tssks manually.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using xda premium
Point noted.
But when I use Airdroid task manager, I see a process when the corresponding app is not running the background.
To mention a few; Cut the rope free, stocks & Hill climb racing.
Few system process like picasa uploader, chrome etc.
As you said andoird may optimize most of them, but I would like some control when running thin on battery.
mohan_168 said:
I am wondering if we have a task manager/process explorer app for Nexus 4? Currently I am using AirDroid v2 that includes a task manager, but I am looking for one with more options.
I travel a lot & would like to kill as much unwanted applications running in the background as possible to conserve battery.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
use greenify https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.oasisfeng.greenify&hl=en to hibernate any persisting apps/processes (except system). apps relaunch when you open them.
Killing apps and then having to reload them actually uses more battery than them being dormant in the background and already loaded when called upon. The problem is when you have misbehaving apps that stay in the foreground eating up cpu, instead of going dormant into the background. And this does happen. I use an app called Watchdog that alerts me when this happens. It allows you to kill the app when this happens. It also allows you to whitelist and blacklist apps and processes.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4 Beta
main phone setting, apps, running.. default task/process manager. in the top right will be an option to show cached process as well.
simms22 said:
main phone setting, apps, running.. default task/process manager. in the top right will be an option to show cached process as well.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
We all know that is there. The op mentioned wanting more options, mainly monitoring and kill options.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4 Beta
mohan_168 said:
I am wondering if we have a task manager/process explorer app for Nexus 4? Currently I am using AirDroid v2 that includes a task manager, but I am looking for one with more options.
I travel a lot & would like to kill as much unwanted applications running in the background as possible to conserve battery.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
fernandezhjr said:
We all know that is there. The op mentioned wanting more options, mainly monitoring and kill options.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4 Beta
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
fast reboot(free), but the paid version i like better https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.greatbytes.fastreboot&hl=en
rayiskon, I will try greenify & let you know how that helps.
fernandezhjr, I agree restarting app is not an optimal way, but I require to squeeze battery to atleast make phone calls when I am away from charging options.
simms22, fast reboot looks promising. I'll try the free one for now and take it from there.
It's kind of already been said, but I want to clarify as much as possible.
Apps running dormant in the background (using RAM) use no more power than if it weren't running. This is because all of the memory you have is being refreshed all the time, the controller has no idea whether there is actually data there, it still refreshes the entire space of memory.
Apps running "dormant" but using CPU do use more power than if it weren't running. I assume OP is wanting some sort of monitoring app that shows which apps are using CPU, in which case is fine. If OP is wanting to kill all apps that he isn't using at the time to conserve battery, then he would actually be doing the opposite of what he wants, as it requires to CPU to spin back up to restart it later. Again, the difference here is RAM vs CPU, one doesn't use battery (or rather, uses the same amount of battery, no matter how much of it is being utilized), and one can use more or less battery depending on how much it's used.
Johmama said:
It's kind of already been said, but I want to clarify as much as possible.
Apps running dormant in the background (using RAM) use no more power than if it weren't running. This is because all of the memory you have is being refreshed all the time, the controller has no idea whether there is actually data there, it still refreshes the entire space of memory.
Apps running "dormant" but using CPU do use more power than if it weren't running. I assume OP is wanting some sort of monitoring app that shows which apps are using CPU, in which case is fine. If OP is wanting to kill all apps that he isn't using at the time to conserve battery, then he would actually be doing the opposite of what he wants, as it requires to CPU to spin back up to restart it later. Again, the difference here is RAM vs CPU, one doesn't use battery (or rather, uses the same amount of battery, no matter how much of it is being utilized), and one can use more or less battery depending on how much it's used.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I understand killing process, shutting down cached process or apps & later restarting them is only going to fire up the CPU usage which completely defeats the purpose of conserving battery.
Though not a daily ask, at times I am stuck in situation where a phone call or SMS is all I need to keep me going.

Over-aggressive background task and notification killing on Honor 7 Lite (NEM-L21)

I'm on Honor 7 Lite (NEM-L21C432B356), I love the phone hardware itself but the stock OS (EMUI 5.0.2) is driving me crazy. Background tasks get killed really quickly and often notifications get deleted before I can even see them. I've tried factory reset and everything I've found on Google to no effect.
This isn't about the known push notifications issue. Notifications do work, but then they usually disappear almost immediately. I sometimes hear the notification tone, pick up the phone and unlock it to see a notification icon in the top bar for less than a second and then it's gone. Or if a notification comes in when I'm using the phone, I might see the notification in the list briefly and then it just vanishes.
Background tasks like Twilight or JuiceSSH with statusbar icons seem to get killed really aggressively. This seems to happen more to some apps than others, but I can't figure out any common denominator for the apps. It happens to both online and offline apps.
I've disabled everything related to Huawei's task killing/battery saving settings and added all apps to all exception lists that I've been able to find. Free memory seems to hover consistently around 500-700MB, I don't think I've ever seen free memory dip below 500MB.
It's hard to get good memory stats out of Android 7 without root, but it almost seems like the OS is pre-emptively keeping that 0.5GB of RAM free in case some foreground app wants a lot of memory, and it's willing to pre-emptively kill background tasks, even ones with status bar icons, to achieve it. I don't know if this is true, but Huawei doesn't seem to trust Android's own memory management much in general, with all their dumb "memory cleaning" and "battery optimization" stuff.
I'm at my wits' end here. I rely on seeing all notifications to keep up with reminders and other things, and I need background apps to stay there when I multitask. Custom ROMs aren't really an option, since I want everything on the phone to Just Work without any extra fiddling and hassle and I can't risk my only phone. I appreciate custom ROM developers' work though.
Thanks in advance for any useful answers.
On the P9 Lite with 2 GBs of RAM they are using more than 1.5GBs of zRAM which is crazy. I don't think that's needed at all. If your phone is rooted, you can install a Magisk module called Swap Torpedo to disable swap and maybe change some LMK values. Also you can disable the Power Genie app if you don't have root access.
erayrafet said:
If your phone is rooted, you can install a Magisk module called Swap Torpedo to disable swap and maybe change some LMK values. Also you can disable the Power Genie app if you don't have root access.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm not rooted, because unlocking the bootloader and rooting would trip SafetyNet, which I can't afford because I need some apps that depend on SafetyNet and I don't want the whole cat and mouse game with Magisk trying to keep ahead of Google on that.
Thanks a lot for the Power Genie tip (called Power Genius on my phone), I haven't seen that mentioned anywhere else and will try it out. I hadn't noticed that process at all since it's running under AndroidSystem.
Edit: unfortunately the "Disable" button is grayed out on Power Genius, so disabling it doesn't seem like an option. I can stop it manually, but I assume it'll just get autostarted again. I don't seem to have permissions to hide it from adb shell either.
Same problem here (NEM-L51C432). It aggressively kills all background applications. This prevents multitasking. It is annoying to see a lot of RAM is free and will not be used. RAM is there to take use of it and not to keep it free.

S10 doesn't keep any apps open and has high RAM usage

My Snapdragon S10 is having a weird issue with RAM management. Over the course of a full day, basic apps like the Phone app or Textra will be closed and will need to be refreshed in memory when I open them.
I look at RAM under Device Care and there's around 5.5GB used and 1.9GB free. This is much lower than the free RAM I got on my Note 9 which usually has over 4GB free at all times.
I have Adaptive Battery disabled in the Battery settings as well. There's nothing that should be closing all my apps in the background.
Anyone else get this problem?
Think a few of my apps, like Twitter and Samsung watch app are having this issue.
Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk
I'm down to 1GB of free RAM now on a 8GB phone...
Apps opened in background right now:
Phone
Textra
Whatsapp
Kiwi Browser
Gmail
Google Photos
No games and no heavy apps. How is the free RAM so low? And in a few hours all of these apps will get closed and I'll have to reopen them.
Anyone else with this problem? How much free RAM do you currently have? And not off a fresh reboot
I have the 12gb version and have been experiencing this. It seems to clear some apps if the phone has been on staying for a couple hours.
I have the same issue. The phone becomes really slow after like 2 days of use and had RAM usage of 6.8GB. I checked in Developers settings and it says that AndroidOS and systemUI use both 5.7GB?!?! Any fix or should we report to Samsung?
I have the exynos variant and apps never close for me. Currently it's using 4.7gb out of 8gb with 14 apps open.
I checked if the apps reloaded and they didn't. Under developer settings it says that the OS is using 2.2gb, Android is using 297mb and systemui is using 246mb.
Adaptive battery is on and uptime is probably 4 or 5 days.

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