Update: This does not just happen with games, it can happen with other Flash content on the page as well.

I have been testing hundreds (yes) of Flash games and it did not occur to me that they could cause problems with battery life and performance- besides the obvious impact when playing them, of course.

An example is the game "Afterglow". It is a game that loads, but does not get past the menu screen. I closed the game, but it was still resident in memory and draining the battery. The app is so agressive it activated the device even after being locked.

If you play a Flash game but then notice your device is laggy or running warm, it may be due to a Flash game still running even after closing the browser. It will show as "browsersd" and may be active when you show no open tasks. Need to go to terminal and check from there and then reboot the device if present. Audiopulse may also be running too. The combination of both has been up to 90% of cpu and 40% of memory used. UDPATE: Posts below details how to also kill em' without a reboot.

The N900 needs a task killer for this. It is fine to call this a mini-computer- but at least give me the same function to till kill tasks. When this happens with a computer, you can kill the task with ctrl-alt-delete and then find the culprit and kill it. A UI that covers this process would be good.

This has kind of sucked the fun out of playing Flash games for me, since Afterglow is not the only game that does this and it can get old to have to check after running each game.

That sounds like a serious issue. I'd like a GUI for watching running tasks as well.

Oh and, how about writing about your experiences with games, in this thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=36176 ?

@Rushmore, you know about terminal and ps aux / kill? But I agree, that a nice gui wrapper for this would be useful. Shouldn't be to hard to do.

Just a quick question, rebooting the deviice kills the process right ?

@Nmigaz, yes.

lol - just registered on the forum to pass on the info about /kill - but you beat me to it hopbeat

When I've had to use kill on various linux boxes from time to time, i always use
where pid is the process identifier as listed in the output from the 'top' command (I prefer top as it's easier to see which processes are hogging the cpu without the potential need for scrolling through the long list that the ps command can produce.

More info on the kill command here.

I'm still waiting for my n900 (anyday now) - so thanks for the headsup, definitely something to keep an eye out for.

Cheers.

Thanks guys!

How hard would it be for one of our fine Maemo overlords to create and add the task killer function in the UI?

@Pyrran, sorry for that, at least now you are a registered user (welcome )

@Rushmore, don't know about the overlords, the application/widget for this is not too complicated. Probably the most 'demanding' part would be to filter out processes that you do-not-really! want to kill.

Open an xterm and type in

killall browserd

That should kill all running flash sessions.

I do not suggest running

killall -9 browserd

or

killall -kill browserd

on my N900 the -9 switch caused the phone to reboot. There are instances of browserd that run as part of Maemo.

A more precise method is to open a X-terminal then type in

top

the applications using the most cpu will be at the top of the list. Find the PID for the offending program which is in the left column of the list. Then press q to exit top and run

kill PID

If that does not work then run

kill -9 PID

Thanks!

Is adding this type of function as part of the UI on the road-map?

Not just games can cause this. I have noticed that any Flash content on a page can cause the browser to stay active and drain the battery.

Seems like a bug / weak design of the OS and browser. I think that a lot of the random problems with battery and performance people are having is due to Flash and the OS's inability to kill the process when closing the browser.