Application Process still around after app is closed

I have an application that I suspect might be leaking a thread or its context. What makes me think so is that after closing the app, the process is still running (visible process monitoring applications). I've cut everything in the code, going as far as calling finish() from the onCreate. The process is still around and annoying me.

I've read that (from here)

An empty process is one that doesn't hold any active application components. The only reason to keep such a process around is as a cache to improve startup time the next time a component needs to run in it. The system often kills these processes in order to balance overall system resources between process caches and the underlying kernel caches.

How do I know if my process is still around because of circular reference or context leak or anything else e开发者_高级运维qually bad or if is simply that the process is empty?

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The fact that you still see the process will not give you any information about the existence or not of references to objects in your application. There's no magic that's going to answer that for you.

If you are worried, you should inspect where (if anywhere) you are registering callbacks (AKA listeners) with system services. This is a common root cause. the correct pattern is to register in onResume() and unregister in onPause(). You are guaranteed those will be called when your app pauses / resumes.

Unless you have a really special purpose reason, don't as suggested above use the various methods for manually killing your process. The OS has memory management built into it. Don't try to be smarter than the OS. Android keeps application artifacts (activities, services, etc) in memory even when they are "finished". This allows them to re-start faster the next time. If it needs the memory for something else, it will remove the unused processes from memory.

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How are you closing the application? Hitting the back button or the home button doesn't close the application, it just finishes (or pauses) the activity. You have absolutely no control over when Android decides to terminate the process and kill the application.

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finish() doesn't actually kill your application. In almost every case it's the exact same as if the user had hit the back button.

ActivityManager.killBackgroundProcesses(yourPackageName) may be what you're looking for.