Couple of days back Fraser Speirs developer at Connected Flow and Head of Computing and IT at Cedars School of Excellence had written an excellent article to clear the misconceptions about iOS multitasking, where experts and users believe that removing apps from the multitasking bar helps in improving battery life.
The article resulted in an healthy debate among our readers in the comments section, where some readers highlighted that Speirs explanation made sense only in an ideal world and there have been many occasions (specially in case of a badly written app) where they've noticed that killing apps in the background actually helped.
Speirs has now created a nice video to show how iOS multitasking works in more details to clarify some of the doubts. He has used Instruments, which is part of Xcode package to inspect the free memory on the iPad as he ran and suspended various apps.
There are five sections to this video demonstrating:
- An app going from active to background to suspended
- Instacast HD requesting extra background time to finish a podcast download
- TomTom running indefinitely in the background
- Batman Arkham City Lockdown and Real Racing 2 HD competing for big chunks of device memory
- Batman Arkham City Lockdown forcing several smaller apps out of memory
You can check out the video below:
Spiers concludes that "killing apps manually is fine as a troubleshooting step but it shouldn't be part of your daily routine."
Let us know what you think in the comments below.
[via Fraser Speirs' blog]
Wow, 19 updates !
Cool video
Well thats why i would like 1gb of ram in my ipad! No app crashes.
Slightly ironic that I had to visit Vimeo directlt to get this video to pkay on my iPhone. The above embed would not play in Reeder (I subscribe to your feed) nor in icab mobile with either the mobile theme or full site. Played fine on Vimeo though.
Played for me just fine with 35mb ram
What it does and what its supposed to do is irrelevant. The memory in the 3gs is so low I constantly HAVE to close background apps. Maybe its supposed to do it automatically, but if thats the case – it sucks at doing it. Id never have an iPhone if it wasnt jailbroken cause the phone itself as it is, is a piece of junk. Just like the original Xbox, its useless without being modded. And the utillity Kill background apps is the best hack for the iPhone I have ever used.
Cant say if affects battery tho, only performance.
So performance is not important to you?
The reason I find a good process killing application useful is because it can kill certain system processes, like Mail, and/or Phone, freeing up just enough for the large memory eating apps which then run more smoothly. The OS alone will not do that without some intervention.