2009/11/20 Cédric Berger <[email protected]> > But if your service process is killed due to low memory, won't the > system try to restart it later ? (though of course if there are still > too many services running there is still a problem) >
Yes if the service was started with startService(), the system will continue trying to restart it (using a back-off timeout to avoid thrashing too much) until there is enough memory to run it again. If there are just too many services trying to run at the same time, you will end up cycling through the services running each of them some of the time. The only reason the service in this case would just be stopped and not started again is if it has crashed a couple times, or has ANRed in the background (in which case a dialog is not shown, but the system detects this and kills the process). Also note -- if you are using setForeground() it is EXTREMELY unlikely the system is killing your service due to low memory, since this API basically turns that off. (Though note in 2.0 this API no longer does anything, and you need to use the new APIs that tie this state to a notification; for older releases, you are supposed to do this so the user can know what is going on and stop the service, and this is now enforced in 2.0.) If you find your service going away while it is in the foreground, you should be looking for the service crashing or ANRing rather than thinking the system is killing it for memory. And I'll say again please please please avoid just running services continually in the background. We don't have enough memory in a lot of the devices for more than a few applications to do this. If you really need to, please make it clear in your app that this is happening, with a UI for the user to stop the service if they don't need it. And you will just have to deal with the fact that there will be situations where the system can't keep your service running -- for example, if the user goes to a fairly heavy-weight web site, this itself could consume enough memory that the system needs to kill most if not all of the background services for that time. Finally, you can find some information about what the system is doing in the log with "adb logcat". There is often some more useful details in the low-level event log that you can see with "adb logcat -b events". If you are going to ask for help with these kinds of questions, it would be extremely useful to post the log output that is seen when the service process goes away. Also you can use "adb shell dumpsys activity.services" to see the state of all services. If your service has been started, even if its process is killed and it is not running, you will see it in here, with a number of useful things about its current state. -- Dianne Hackborn Android framework engineer [email protected] Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails. All such questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and answer them. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
