Gadgetory

hello my name's Gary Simmons from Android or authority now if you've ever had a misbehaving app on your smart phone maybe you've looked around the internet you've read some forums and somewhere on the lines I'm going to say to you you should do a full stop and a clear cache that will help your problem so the question before today what is a four stop what is a cache and wise are the four stop and clear cache actually help fix misbehaving out well let me explain okay at the very heart of anguish is the Linux kernel and inside of Linux all programs that run running a thing called a process and the protein is a logical container that allows the kernel to know about which programs are running which memory is allocated to them what priority they have how much CPU time they need and basically in Android every app you run actually runs inside of a limits process now I won't go into much more now about the nuts prototype on a whole video on proteases and thread that you can find here on the and realtor cheat channel if you go to the front page of the Android 40 channel you'll see a playlist for all of Garry explains videos and you can easily find it in there now when you start an application it starts a Linux process and it can basically go through some different states now at the Linux level it can go through running runnable and sleeping so when a process is for example actually on the CPU is running when it's ready to run on the CPU it's run a ball and we're waiting for something to happen like network traffic it's known as sleeping now Android also has some different states for the activities which make up your app and those activities include running and pause and stopped and basically what happens is is that Linux or Android can say to an app you are now in the poor state or you're going to be stopped which tells it's going to kill it off or it's going to have to need to stays on this data creates about to be killed and what's interesting is when Android wants to stop an app it doesn't actually stop the app it just has to Linux kill that process which means that the process get obliterated out of memory or the memories freed up is not given any more CPU time all the files they had opened are closed any locks that it had open are free and so on basically by Linux kills off the process everything just disappears which is a great way to ensure that the app have actually just completely gone and just like Android can tell Linux to kill a process you can tell Android to tell Linux to kill a process and that's what force stop does basically you say - and what I want this process to stop and it will obliterate it from memory and it will be definitely gone now the reason why that helps because if you have a misbehaving app it's going to helping - a funny loop it's got yourself into a funny condition and it's not recovering and by doing a fourth stop you're actually killing off the protein then when you restart it it may very well start back up into a better state and start functioning and it needs be another good thing about full stop is that once the process has been deleted then all the open files have been closed which means we know the files inside the cache directory are now no longer being used so what's the cache directory basically the cache directory is a place where an app can store temporary files for example if when the app starts up it needs to download something from the internet maybe data feed maybe some images it could just download those things every time it starts up or every time you refresh the display but of course that will take a long time and it will also use up your bandwidth much better to get it periodically and then stall the files in the cache and then from time to time the app can say hey should I update these files that are in my cache or are they ok at the moment it would also be true for example if it was doing some processing maybe it downloads some data from the internet but it needs to be uncompressed or decoded or decrypted or something then actually those files also go in the cache and again from time to time you can say do I need to go and get a newer version the latest version but when you do refresh the app when you do restart the app it can get a lot of its data directly from the cache rather than having to go out onto the Internet to go and get it or using its processing time to actually decode or decrypt the files but what happens sometimes is those cache files get them cell in a muzzle mainly a card in the program or it hasn't refreshed them when it should have done theirs newer ones available means that hasn't brought them down and what you do by clear cache you delete all those files now that's perfectly okay because Android apps are written in such a way but it knows that files are in the cache early temporary and if they're not there it doesn't panic it just goes to the internet again and goes and gets an or it does the processing again to decrypt or decode or whatever it needs to do to those files so it knows that there is a situation when a cache fault might not be there so therefore by keying in the cache what you're actually doing is saying to the out hey you've got nothing here let's start again so by doing a full stop and a clear cache your restarting the program with some new with an empty cache which means it has to start again with new data and hopefully that will fix the program my name is Gary Sims from Andrew authority I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up I'd like to mention that there is a playlist of all the gary explains videos on the front page of the android authority youtube channel also don't forget to subscribe to the android or throw to youtube channel it's also going to be download the app because that will give you access to all our news and features directly on your mobile phone and last but not least do go over to Android or chicom because we are your source for all things Android