Background applications
 

Hi,

I noticed a lot of background applications running in the background. camera-ui or rtcom-call-ui - it's obvious, as you need them launched quickly. But there are many others, like modest, image-viewer, Calendar. Which of them can be safely disabled for background (without losing functionality, only losing speed) and which are essential?

Full list of bg stuff on the go (sorted by memory used):
Thanks

Re: Background applications
 

If you look at the output you will see the stat column states the processes are in 'S' mode. This means they are asleep. They are using no processing power whatsoever.

To stop certain programs autostarting/refusing to die you need to change the 'start with hildon' option in the programs'.desktop' file and possibly stop it being started by that watchdog program that I cannot remember the name of. (the one that reboots the n900 if xorg has crashed >5 times in a row)

Re: Background applications
 

They don't use CPU, but eat RAM, don't they?

Re: Background applications
 

They do not use much ram at all. They get swapped out when the thread is sleeping. If you look with htop, you can see how much actual 'real' ram they are using.

I sem to recall I removed image-viewer and possibly something else from the startup list. Image viewer takes a little longer to load but that does not bother me.

Re: Background applications
 

They seem to do use real RAM. According to htop: image-viewer (RES): 8968, modest: 11956.

So roughly 9/12 MB real RAM used. (RES is in KB according to the IBM website: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/c...top190?lang=en )

Re: Background applications
 

main reason to get rid of them (if you are really gonna be adamant about it) is to reduce swapping when you load various other apps, or even when a new call or SMS comes in. but aim for the big ones. don't bother very much with the small ones.

i didn't invest time in those processes since there's no documentation on what effects they will have & they seem to affect quite a few things here & there (ie: gets auto restarted, causes some apps to start up slowly, or causes reboots by watchdog). they're not extremely big too, & are really only big after combined.

most of the time, most of them only live in the swap area if not invoked, would not take up any battery & physical memory; just swap memory on emmc storage.

what i did was instead, to disable all daemons that i don't use often (just like what my buddy here did); ie: battery graph, removing many plugins & widgets, disabling any http or sshd servers i may have installed. i typically only use apps that load upon use & completely terminate without background processes upon manual termination.

kh

Re: Background applications
 

@marmistrz

A number of those applications running in the background are started by hildon-desktop if their .desktop file has "X-Maemo-Prestarted=always".

Have a look in /usr/share/applications/hildon and do "grep Prestarted= *.desktop" to have a look.

With "=always" I have { calendar, osso-addressbook, rtcom-call-ui, rtcom-messaging-ui }
With "=never" I have { browser, image-viewer, modest, nokia-maps, worldclock }