Having the DoggCatcher service running in the background causes my G1 to really struggle. I'm on Cupcake and with the service running everything else takes forever to load, including the home screen. Text input is also made really slow. Killing DoggCatcher instantly relieves this but makes the app pretty pointless if it's not going to download podcasts automatically. Is there something I can turn off to make this better?
I saw your comment in the market, but unfortunately, devs can't post there (unless we buy an extra phone for that purpose). So, thanks for coming here to discuss it.
I am pretty surprised you are experiencing this. I do notice other things running slower when DoggCatcher is either updating feeds or downloading media and this is normal. However, when it's not doing one of those two things, and it's not in the foreground, it should have little to no impact on performance.
Let me know whether you notice this when DC is updating feeds or downloading, and then also send me the log (in the menu - capture log). I might be able to tell of there is a problem there.
Thanks.
Hi Eric,
I'll send the log file right away. It appears to have quite a few Low Memory calls for DoggCatcher so I suspect that might be to do with the issue. The problem happens all the time.
According to Task Manager it's using 18k of memory, my most memory intensive app, but only by a couple of k. The process tab show it as active.
I really hope there's an easy fix for this as this was easily a 5 star app for me.
Thanks,
Dan
vrih and I worked this out via email. It turns out that there are memory issues not related DoggCatcher that are causing the problem. He is in the process of narrowing down the cause.
Hi,
I'm getting similar behavior to the OP. When DoggCatcher is running, I usually use BT A2DP, everything slows down a lot. It's fine running on it's own but if I try to do something else, like the browser or checking gmail, it is very sluggish. I did a test with DoggCatcher playing a audio podcast in the background and then launching gmail, it hung up the os and did a reboot, perhaps because of low memory. You would think that if it operated like the native music player in the background, other foreground tasks would be ok. hopefully there is a fix soon. let me know if you want me to send a log. by the way, if the G1 reboots, will the log erase info before the reboot? Thanks.
There was a performance issue that I have fixed in the version the beta testers have been using. It should be released to the market this weekend or early next week. I also did experience some sluggishness when using DC in the background that is also resolved with the fix.
Once you get the next update, let me know if you are still having the problem. If so, we can dig into your logs and try to find the problem.
As far as the reboot...never heard of that happening before, but I'm pretty sure the log events would get purged.
Thanks for the feedback.
Issue - http://mantis.snoggdoggler.com/view.php?id=145
Hi, same problem here on HTC Magic. DC causes my phone to become unresponsive, I use A2DP to play back podcasts. My other apps force close (browser, home, etc) and the soft keyboard hardly works at all, when I stop DC using task manager it comes back to life. When is the next version coming out? Could I become a beta tester to get it early?
I have noticed something similar to what you are describing however when I kill *any* application (DC or other), acceptable performance returns. So it seems that when a low memory situation occurs, killing any process frees up enough memory.
Having said that, there is one change that I have been working on that should get to the beta testers in the next week or so. It involves allowing DC to be evicted more easily from memory when it is not busy (playing media/refreshing feeds/downloading). When android is need of resources, DC will die (if it's not busy), and wake back up then next time feeds need to be updated.
This is probably the way it should have been to begin with and as I've become more familiar with Android, I realized that I needed to make this change.
If possible, I'll make it configurable so the old behavior will exist if you really want it to.
As a side note, I have been tracing memory usage over the past week or so checking for leaks and the memory usage has been constant without any app restarts.
Thanks for the feedback.