Oct 24, 2011

SystemPanel - Heavenly manna for Android phones

This is one of the best apps I have on my phone.
SystemPanel is a monitoring application, that monitors CPU usage, RAM, battery, etc. This is 100x better than a Task Killer (and it also works as a manual task killer - you can see live how much CPU is the app using and used over time, and another bunch of useful things).

You can solve your battery life problems with this app, by enabling the background monitoring service to record long-term CPU usage by individual apps. This way you can see what happens to your lovely Android device overnight, and delete the applications that go wild (sometimes you go to sleep with 100% battery and wake up with 80% or less.. this happens because some apps are badly optimized and for no reason start to eat CPU).
Now with systempanel you can see how intensively your CPU was working at night. (Mine is below 2%)

Ok so let me teach you how to use this app.


This is the start screen. You can disable the system monitor from the settings (the bar with the Pie chart of the CPU, RAM and storage).
Ok, so under that system monitor are the apps that are running. And before each app icon there is a bar that shows how much CPU is the app using at that moment (live monitor).
You can also hold your finger on a running process and select End task to kill it.

To set this app up for monitoring, you need to go to settings, and then check the "Monitoring enabled" option.
Now you need to leave it like that over for a minimum of 2 hours. (you can close the app as it will run in the background and will use approximately one minute of CPU / battery time PER DAY of operation - so this means very very little power)
The app will only run in the background if the monitoring is enabled!

Now I will teach you how to check the History.

 
On the start screen bring up the menu, and select "Monitor". Once there, you will see a live view of what your device is doing now, Battery state, and even battery temperature.
Now press "History".


Before I start to explain what is what, press the "1 Day" button and change it to "2 Hours". This means you will only see what happened in the last 2 hours. (you can change it back to 1 day or even 2 days if you like, but 2 Hours gives you a better view of whats going on)
Here you will see 3 categories. Battery, Device usage and CPU. The battery will show you when was the last time you charged your phone (the green bar under the time stamps) and how long was it left in the charger.
Device usage: no comment here, it shows how intensively did you use your device and at what time. When you unlock your phone and navigate it's usually 50%-75%. Gaming is about 100%, and so on.
CPU Activity: this shows you how hard your CPU was working. Overnight you need to have it under 3%. It is related to Device Usage, so whenever you have high device usage, you will have higher CPU activity under it.

Now press the "Plot" and select "Top Apps". This will show you a list of the apps that used your CPU.


Here you can see that System Process is the most consuming app (it is normal). That consumption is shown based on "8 hours" interval, aka. the top consuming apps that ran in the last 8 hours.
In other words, if you played a game at 12:00, and is now 15:00 the game will not show up if the interval is "2 Hours". Setting it to "8 Hours" will make the game and whatever you did before 12:00 show up. You can click on an app to see a detailed chart of how much CPU did the particular app use.
Ex. from the picture: System Processes was running 22m14s in the last 8 hours. Music was running for 1m3s in the past 8hours. (the % is average consumption).

Happened to me that I went to bed with 100% battery and woke up with 60%. I didnt know what was draining my battery. So I left systempanel overnight, and the next morning I checked the history, and saw that the weather app used a lot of CPU power. So I uninstalled it and battery drain was back to normal.
It is really simple to use and way better than a Task Killer, and as I already told you, you can use it to kill apps that do not respond (instead of killing every running process...).
CPU is the real battery and performance killer. So do not use a Task Killer, use this app instead. It is way better, and can also serve as a task killer when needed.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comments. I will be happy to reply.

3 comments:

Liaata said...

thanks for telling me about this app!
always wanted to check all the processes and know how much they consume!

Michael Westside said...

This is not a HD wallpaper

norbi_nw said...

Who said anything about HD wallpaper? XD even the Labels show that it is Android stuff :P

Post a Comment