This, however, is not "impact-less": when running truly memory-intensive games, they will experience performance degradation while the OS performs cleanup and shutdown of the various applications "hibernating".
I'm not 100% sure, but I think this is mostly due to how memory warnings are staged.
I think the sequence is: OS sends a level 1 memory warning to any running applications. Then it starts killing backgrounded apps. If it kills 'em all and memory is still tight, running apps get level 2'ed. Then it starts killing running apps.
So a well behaved game that's running close to the capabilities of the device is likely to do a bunch of stuff that will impact its performance when it gets that level 1 warning. It's going to purge caches and otherwise free a bunch of memory, and you'll see stutter. Furthermore if Mail.app and friends are running, they are probably also going to get warned and eat some time cutting memory use.
Again, I don't know the exact cost, but I think killing suspended processes is pretty cheap and it is really the memory warnings that cause a stutter.
> Again, I don't know the exact cost, but I think killing suspended processes is pretty cheap and it is really the memory warnings that cause a stutter.
Might be, my point is mostly that iOS's application management is not as painless and transparent as TFA makes it sound, there are (edge) cases where "not managing background tasks" impacts the experience even when all applications are correctly coded and well-behaved.
Exactly. The management of background apps is FAR from being impact-less as the author gives the impression. Try leaving Skype connected and see what it does to your battery (even when you DON'T want to receive skype calls in the background).
While he's correct in stating that the multitasking bar does NOT show apps currently running (just the apps that were recently used, regardless of state), he fails to point that deleting the apps there WILL indeed move the apps from Background or Suspended to Not Running, effectively freeing memory and CPU.
And this is exactly the intention of those "authoritative sources" that he criticizes. The recommendation to kill background/suspended apps is an effective (and the only official) way to manually solve battery drain or memory on the 5% of cases that iOS can't do by itself.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think this is mostly due to how memory warnings are staged.
I think the sequence is: OS sends a level 1 memory warning to any running applications. Then it starts killing backgrounded apps. If it kills 'em all and memory is still tight, running apps get level 2'ed. Then it starts killing running apps.
So a well behaved game that's running close to the capabilities of the device is likely to do a bunch of stuff that will impact its performance when it gets that level 1 warning. It's going to purge caches and otherwise free a bunch of memory, and you'll see stutter. Furthermore if Mail.app and friends are running, they are probably also going to get warned and eat some time cutting memory use.
Again, I don't know the exact cost, but I think killing suspended processes is pretty cheap and it is really the memory warnings that cause a stutter.