Don't kill my app

Re:Don't kill my app by ClassyJacket on Thursday November 23, 2023 @01:15AM (#38389919)

I despise that this still happens today on a phone with 8GB of RAM. EIGHT GIGABYTES. That's what they sell the MacBook Pro with, but Android, built for low memory devices from the ground up, can't consistently keep a single application in memory in the background for just a few seconds. You can literally switch for five seconds and the last app has to reload.

This drives me absolutely nuts.

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Re:Don't kill my app by Reason077 on Thursday November 23, 2023 @01:30AM (#38389995)

I kind of understand manufacturers getting aggressive about rogue inefficient apps wasting cpu cycles and making their battery life look bad.

But it’s weird and lazy that on an 8GB phone they kill the app rather than just suspend it (to stop it using any cpu)?

On iOS, even in low-power mode, and on a phone with far less RAM, apps rarely have to reload unless you’ve force-quit them or have gone for days without using them.

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Re:Don't kill my app by morsch on Thursday November 23, 2023 @01:45AM (#38390081)

8 GB of memory on a laptop is pathetic in 2023 and everybody knows it. And you're either using a very broken Android OS implementation or very unusual apps, it should not behave that way.

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Re:Don't kill my app by numpad0 on Thursday November 23, 2023 @01:59AM (#38390169)

Yeah. It's supposed to be like 8 thousand UNIX computers. It just has to be insanely enormous bloat.

Hence my personal belief: GUI operating systems must evolve to slow down to match user-expected frequency of stimuli. Too fast and users leave, so they add crufts and weights until it's slow enough.

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Re:Don't kill my app by toast0 on Thursday November 23, 2023 @01:23AM (#38389952)

What's worse is when the task switching app and/or the home screen app have to be restarted. My phone only has 4 GB ram, cause it's nearly 3 years old and low cost, but still... I feel like windows 95 could run (poorly) on 4 MB and the start button and the task bar never swapped out. (Well explorer.exe did crash from time to time)

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Re:Don't kill my app by kqr on Thursday November 23, 2023 @01:30AM (#38389987)

I have to admit I haven't fact-checked this on my own but I have it on fairly good authority that several versions of Windows could swap themselves out, sometimes resulting in a bluescreen.

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Re:Don't kill my app by g-b-r on Thursday November 23, 2023 @03:37AM (#38390717)

Windows has ALWAYS asked the user which processes to kill under memory stress, except in the most extreme of conditions (when it crashed).

Android and iPhones thought they'd look cooler if they didn't, resulting in a decade of endless frustration for many users.

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Re:Don't kill my app by kqr on Thursday November 23, 2023 @04:22AM (#38390971)

Note that I was talking about writing processes to swap, not killing them!

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Re:Don't kill my app by g-b-r on Thursday November 23, 2023 @07:54AM (#38392237)

Yes indeed, I'm pretty sure that explorer.exe can or could get swapped out. I don't think that can result in a bdod though

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Re:Don't kill my app by g-b-r on Thursday November 23, 2023 @08:02AM (#38392290)

The start button and the task bar are part of explorer.exe, although if I'm not mistaken the File Explorer windows have always been run in a separate instance of explorer.exe .

I'm pretty sure that the task bar and start button could get swapped out btw, but they're quick to reload (except for the start menu and the tray icons)

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