Why does my android lags ?

Ever feel why does your device suddenly lag or beginning to lag after you had install various different applications ?

Android is a multitasking operating systems in which various different applications can run concurrently at the foreground or background. By now you would have notice about your device that there is not a button that explicitly closes the application. This in turn would make us think, "So where is the application after we click upon the back button ?"

Most applications would actually go behind the scene and became a background task. (I'm saying MOST, but not all) Then when the android operating system needs more memory, it will actually kills off these background process which have a lower priority thus releasing the memory (deallocate) for other applications to use. So now you understand how your device memory works right ?

Next you need to be aware that a lot of stuff in the android device takes up memory which the memory does not gets deallocated. Some examples:-

1) Live wallpapers

2) Widgets

3) Launcher

4) Background running process (ebuddy, email, twitter and facebook polling and such)

It may not be that all the process mentioned above lags your device altogether. From my prior experience, it may due to one single application that went "rogue" which causes "memory leaks" hence slowing down the system. You may wish to switch off each of these background process one by one to test out which process is the culprit.

One other remedy is to tweak the "MinFree" parameters of your Android. Like telling your Android device to grab memory even if it's not "hungry". This in turn will make your device function smoother as you have surplus amount of memory to use but the downfall is that more and frequent background applications would be killed. If you wish to try to tweak that part of your device, download an application called "Autokiller" (Screenshot at the beginning of this post). You need root access to use it though.