Killing activities when memory gets short

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On 8 Aug 2010, at 18:40, Tiago Marques <tiagomnm at gmail.com> wrote:
> The idea of killing activities with the content closed seems ok but it would probably be a good idea to have a way to opt out of it for some apps. I'm thinking a PDF that may be left open on purpose to serve as reference to something, a browser window, etc.

An opt out could be easily abused... In the PDF case the activity could be closed and reopened under the hoods, without the user even noticing (well, startup time aside).

> Are you then proposing to use the LRU policy to do the killing? I'm thinking that a popup with a cancel tied to a timeout may be a good idea. Once it is not allowed to be killed, it should not try to again for the session, or at least for a very large increase in query time.

Imo a confirmation popup would become annoying very quickly. Also if the user refuses, the kernel will have soon to kill an activity, which is worst.

> Apps like instant messaging(though I don't recall one for Sugar), would definitely need a definitive opt out, no?

Yeah, that's where things get tricky :/ Same issue with a background music player for example. Ideally we would just keep the connection open somehow and close the whole UI, but that's going to get complex.

As long as this causes just minor annoyances to the user (like being disconnected or music stopping), I think it's probably something we don't need to solve in the first iteration.

Marco