Horrible battery life after 2.3.6

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CNLiberal

Senior Member
Dec 8, 2008
421
50
Centennial, CO
Well, I'm suffering this battery drain issue. I have done a few things to try and trace it down. I have taken several screen shots, but I've also tried a "Shark for Root" and will post the pcap here.

I was running the UKK6 baseband earlier today. I reverted back to what my phone came with, UCKH7. I thought that would clear up the issue. It did not. I was at 1% battery about 10 minutes ago. So I got about 12 hours out of the battery. That just doesn't seem right. I'm running UnNamedROM 2.2.1. I'm not sure what else I can do at this point. Any help would be appreciated. Or should I post this in Entropy's battery thread?

EDIT:

I took the phone off the charger around 8:20 this morning. I have WiFi continuously active along with 3G. I put it in my truck and plugged in the car charger and a jack into my stereo and listened to music on the way to work. The screen shuts off after a minute or so.

When I get to work, the phone goes onto my company's public network. That network uses Cisco Aironet 1400 access points. The public firewall is actually a pfSense install running on an ESXi box. I do not plug my phone into AC during the day. It was actually a very light email day. I was really hoping to get more out of it. I had a few text messages, and would play Angry Birds at times. Nothing really crazy. I also checked the Market for updates. Just before lunch, I swapped basebands back down to UCKH7.

Then I went to lunch a little after noon. Hopped back in my truck, and plugged in, and listened to music again. It's about a 10 minute trip home. The phone got back on to my home wireless network. It consists of a Linksys WRT54G running DD-WRT v24sp1. The firewall/router is a pfSense box running on SuperMicro 1U Intel Atom processor with Intel NICs. Again, I didn't plug the phone in.

Finished lunch, and repeated procedure. I thought the battery was holding out much better when I got back to work. My office has a mini-gym/fitness room, so at 5, I went there. I traversed a few Cisco APs to get there, but all the while, stayed on the same SSID (Public). I listened to music stored on the SD card using the PlayerPro app. I left the gym around 6 and still had about 28% battery. I thought it was going very well.

I got home around 6:10 and between then and now, I got down to 1% battery. I didn't use the phone at all. When I heard the 15% warning I was skeptical. Within about 10 minutes of that, I heard the 5% warning. Then I installed Shark for Root and Shark Reader and got the pcaps. What else can I provide to troubleshoot this?

I know that looks like a wall of text, but I'm trying to provide as much detail as possible to aid in troubleshooting.
 

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Last edited:

CNLiberal

Senior Member
Dec 8, 2008
421
50
Centennial, CO
Honestly that is a huge block of edit text, perhaps format and condense if possible?

Thanks for the advice on formatting. It was a huge wall of text.

Unfortunately, I'm leaving it detailed because I thought those details would help in the troubleshooting. To show that I went on and off 2 WiFi networks all day and the times that happened.
 

DragonQ

Senior Member
Oct 27, 2011
153
31
Haven't been in this thread for a while but I just tried connecting to a different WiFi network at work (there's two, an "open" one that requires browser login and a "secure" one that uses WPA2 Enterprise login). Turns out both of them cause major battery drain on my Galaxy S2 (2.3.4, XWKI4), around 5-10% per hour.

Just wondering if there's any more developments on this issue? I've thought about rooting my phone so if I do, what version/type of ROM would probably fix this issue?
 

Entropy512

Senior Recognized Developer
Aug 31, 2007
14,088
25,086
Owego, NY
Haven't been in this thread for a while but I just tried connecting to a different WiFi network at work (there's two, an "open" one that requires browser login and a "secure" one that uses WPA2 Enterprise login). Turns out both of them cause major battery drain on my Galaxy S2 (2.3.4, XWKI4), around 5-10% per hour.

Just wondering if there's any more developments on this issue? I've thought about rooting my phone so if I do, what version/type of ROM would probably fix this issue?

XWKI4 is close in build time to XXKI3, which has an issue that prevents the screen-off packet filters from enabling. There's a good chance you'll see this problem go away on XWKL1 or XWLA4.
 

emohawk

New member
Oct 25, 2005
2
0
44
Cambridgeshire
Hi all,

I have been reading through this thread as i have truly horrible battery life on my SGS (i9000) since upgrading to to the Samsung stock 2.3.6 rom.

I have had all the symptoms of the previous posters such as
> Warm (well blooming hot) rear case
> Android OS using 90% of Battery

My update was installed via cable and the Kies desktop, As normal I performed a hard reset to ensure the update was fully embedded and all my apps and settings restored.

However, I have found a "work around" and potentially identified further info to track down the root cause.

After the issues I restored my phone and re-enabled all my settings and apps one by one and found that once I had entered my email settings (both exchange servers with the collection method set to hourly) the issue returned and I had a hot phone with no battery life. Removing the settings again resolved the issue.

Interestingly the GMail app does not cause the same battery drain also my WIFI is permanently enabled and connected at home/work

would be interested to hear if the email is the same cause for other people?
 
Last edited:

Phalanx7621

Senior Member
Jul 17, 2011
5,017
2,277
Delaware
OnePlus 8 Pro
Google Pixel 5a
2.3.6 has known battery drain issues. And I'm putting it nicely. Most on here would probably call it.....well....you may wanna move away from that firmware version. Why not try ICS ? Or at least switch back to. 2.3.4 firmware :p

"Sent from my SGS2 running AOKP. Open source or GTFO."
 

ilgadets

Senior Member
May 26, 2011
68
5
what are the chances this problem will still exist in the offical ics release? i've been holding off in rooting and rom-ing. just wondering if i'm wasting my time waiting for the official ics release.
 

mattdm

Senior Member
Dec 31, 2011
1,422
447
what are the chances this problem will still exist in the offical ics release? i've been holding off in rooting and rom-ing. just wondering if i'm wasting my time waiting for the official ics release.

I'm sure there is going to be a lot of problems with the official release, as always. It's gonna be a mess.
 

dmnall

Senior Member
what are the chances this problem will still exist in the offical ics release? i've been holding off in rooting and rom-ing. just wondering if i'm wasting my time waiting for the official ics release.

I would recommend just get it done and over with and Root/Flash a custom Firmware, trust me you are better off than waiting for ics. Plus a Touchwiz ics = crap..

I'm sure there is going to be a lot of problems with the official release, as always. It's gonna be a mess.

As for ATT's updates yes I will agree and even looking at some of the leaks were horrible as well.

SHOstock2!!!

Sent from my SGH-I777 using xda premium

Shostock2 is a good rom, however, Touchwiz sucks! I prefer stock android, my vote is AOKP! I get better battery life with aokp than I did with SHOStock2 *2.1 was the last version*. Plus see my opinion about TW..

Cheers,
Charlie
 

ricktat

Senior Member
Nov 14, 2011
379
58
Grave Digger!!!!

Zombiethread!!!!!

DIE DIE DIE!!!!:D

Can I use ROM Manager on my SG2?
 

Skv012a

Senior Member
Jun 19, 2008
517
47
MD
Sony Xperia 5 IV
I'm on 2.3.4 stock w/ stock CWMed 2.6.35.7 kernel and its THE best battery life I've gotten compared to ALL custom roms and kernels, period.

I use my sammy as a tablet, so occasional half hour of a game or checking some online apps, wifi being off in between, and so far I've 27:50:xx up time w/ 39% battery left. It loses if 1% overnight in pretty much standby w/ everything power-draining off.
 

randybarrett

Member
Oct 13, 2011
6
0
Bad ICS battery life, worse than GB

Ok, I installed 2.3.6 from AT&T and my bettery life has tanked.

Batter Usage shows the Android OS at 93%!!!

Not using my phone, it is dead in about 7 hours.

Kernel Version
2.6.35.7

Build Number
GINGERBREAD.UCKK6

I am not rooted and dont want to root.

HELP!

I just upgraded the firmware on my i777 and the battery life is a bunch worse. I used to get through to at least to lunch with only using twenty to twenty five percent, now I just let it sit for a couple of hours and it just magically drains. If given a choice, don't upgrade.
 

Eternalty

Senior Member
Apr 17, 2012
1,772
660
Los Angeles, California
I just upgraded the firmware on my i777 and the battery life is a bunch worse. I used to get through to at least to lunch with only using twenty to twenty five percent, now I just let it sit for a couple of hours and it just magically drains. If given a choice, don't upgrade.

Way to necro this thread that's 2 months old...dude we've known this for months and you would have known that if u searched

Sent from my SGH-i777 using XDA
 

va540area

Senior Member
Jan 16, 2013
121
18
Virginia
I read a possible solution on another forum and tried it with my SGS2 today and am amazed at the difference today in my battery life.

Worth a shot as it does not require anything more than charging your phone and pulling the battery.

Charge your phone to 100% with the phone off (hold the power button for 3 seconds or so until the menu comes up and select power off). When you reach 100%, unplug the charger and remove your battery (some said keep the battery removed for 90 seconds while others said 3-5 minutes). I left my battery out for 5 minutes or so. Put the battery back in and power on.

That was it. My Android OS went back to normal and the battery life today has been great if not better then with 2.3.6 than before I updated.

Screen grab of my current battery use after trying this method this morning is attached.

did this continue to work for you? or was it more of a one time thing? i have tryed a lot of diffrent things and i dont see how this simple action would fix the problem for good. im still on 2.3.6, thinking about rooting to JELLYBEAN 4, i have read so many reviews were people coming off gingerbread get DOUBLE battery life with jelly bean!
 

Miami_Son

Senior Member
Feb 4, 2009
2,877
354
Hurricane Country
did this continue to work for you? or was it more of a one time thing? i have tryed a lot of diffrent things and i dont see how this simple action would fix the problem for good. im still on 2.3.6, thinking about rooting to JELLYBEAN 4, i have read so many reviews were people coming off gingerbread get DOUBLE battery life with jelly bean!

Not likely to get an answer from a 7+ month old thread you've raised from the dead.
 

ramizs

New member
Aug 16, 2010
2
0
I suggest using Shostock3 v2.5.1 with Jeboo Kernal 2.1

I suggest using Shostock3 v2.5.1 with Jeboo Kernal 2.1
With this combo you can use an app called "2nd Core" to shut off second cpu core and work on one, which saves a lot of battery. Really happy with battery life by doing this and you don't feel much performance lacking, unless you play heavy graphics games
 

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  • 3
    Well if it's an APP causing it, then many many people must be running the same app cause all of the various forums out there are a lot of people with the battery drain after updating to 2.3.6. Even a lot of my customers have mentioned it also.

    I doubt it is an APP doing it. I'd bet it is just some bad coding on Samsung's part. They are probably getting a lot of complaints and are most likely already looking into it.

    As far as the why he is here if he doesn't root. Well I don't root as well and have no desire to being as stock works just great. (other than the battery drain)

    This is a great place to hang out and keep up on other people using various phones. He posted in the General section, not the Developer's section for this phone. So I think his/her question was valid.

    If he was asking the question in the Developers section I would understand your concern. But I don't feel you have to be into cooked ROMS to value this forum.

    That's like saying to the people who like the "Fast and the Furious" moves to stop watching them because they have a Chevy and not a pimped up Civic. :)
    3
    Just an update about my last thread, I'm currently at 6 hours off battery so far, battery still at 91%, so that's about 1.5% drain per hour. I have used it a tiny bit also, and yes WiFi and the cell radio have been on the whole time. Right now Android OS is sitting at 46% battery life which is reasonable on the current usage, I know that it's not running away with my battery anymore because Android System is right behind it at 24% and then Cell standby at 12% after that. CPU spy timers are 15 min in 200MHz, 5 hours 39 min in deep sleep, and that's out of 6:09:21 total.

    If somebody would like me to post the screencap I have of it, just let me know, otherwise I'm going to just be lazy and not upload it.


    The reason I am posting all of this info is for the other people out there lurking (I know there are some) who are trying to decide whether or not to make the jump into rooting for the sake of getting their battery life back. It seems scary if you've never done it before, but now that I have, I'm not sure why it ever was. Anyway, very simple steps here.

    1. Go to this thread: here.

    2. If you're on 2.3.6 (which I'm assuming you are if you received the OTA update that murdered batt. life) Use method 2c (titled: 2c.) How to root by flashing Entropy512's Return/Unbrick to Stock, Kernel + Rooted System Package with Modem using Odin3 One-Click Downloader)

    Before doing step 3 I advise that you download Titanium Backup, go into the Backup/restore tab, hit menu button on your phone, click Batch, and select Backup all user apps + system data.


    Note: You will have to redo all your widgets and such manually using this method. So I'd suggest taking a few screen shots of what each of your homescreens look like.

    3. After you are rooted (all steps on how to use that method are included in that thread) you will most likely not be able to activate your WiFi. Simple solution, go to Settings>Privacy>Factory data reset. You do ****NOT**** need to format USB storage for this to work. So leave that checkbox UNchecked.

    4. Boot your phone up and do all the intro steps to get back to your freshly wiped device. Confirm that your WiFi is working. Is it working? Yes? Good. Now go back into the market and redownload Titanium Backup.

    !!!!!!!!!!!Do NOT do a full batch restore with TiBu as it will rebreak your WiFi!!!!!!!!!!!


    5. Go to the Backup/restore tab in TiBu, go find all the apps that you actually want back, and click "Restore" and it will ask you if you want to restore the app, the data, or both. Do this until you have all your apps back.

    Hopefully this will give a few of you that are still on the fence the courage to join the wonderful world of rooting. My next step will be finding out more info on the topic of Kernels and ROMs.
    2
    The forum is called xda-DEVELOPERS.com

    If you don't want to root, you're probably better off in the AT&T support forums, because honestly, it isn't worth our time to try and help someone who doesn't want to root fix a problem that is almost sure to require root access to fix, or in this case, even diagnose.
    2
    Yovee got me two good caps that seem to have the smoking gun.

    As to how to FIX it, I'm not sure.

    But I do have to say: ****ING BROADCOM.

    It's the exact same issue the Infuse community has had for a while:
    http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1408433

    Confirmation from other people would be useful (there may be multiple sources, such as one person seemed to be getting drain due to Windows Client Backup broadcasts) - but if you see stuff like this in your Wireshark captures:
    Code:
          1 0.000000    9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
          2 1.230671    9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
          3 2.457567    9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
          4 3.688167    9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
          5 4.915498    9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
          8 6.145554    9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         10 7.374758    9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         11 8.603045    9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         12 9.832158    9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         15 11.061042   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         16 12.289468   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         19 13.518508   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         20 14.746922   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         22 15.976068   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         25 17.204985   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         26 18.433658   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         27 19.662156   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         28 20.890973   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         29 22.120120   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         30 23.144282   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         31 24.168026   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         32 25.396524   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         33 26.625761   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         35 27.854481   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         36 29.083182   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         37 30.310235   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         38 32.367309   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         39 32.747929   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
         40 34.402309   9a:0c:82:63:72:56     SamsungE_63:72:56     0x886c   74     Ethernet II
    It's Broadcom's BT-AMP function flaking out. This is some wacky proprietary Bluetooth-over-wifi **** that apparently never does anything except kill battery. (I've never seen this function actually be USEFUL.)
    2
    Is this affecting everyone that has updated to 2.3.6 or is it only a small percentage? Should I wait until this is fixed before updating?

    I'm still new to android so not sure if this is just an issue every time there is an update, a small percentage of users will experience problems or if it's this particular update. Just trying to decide if I should take my chances and go ahead and update.

    Right now, my suspicion (but I need more data to confirm) is that a few IPv6 multicast addresses got added to the wifi chip's MAC filter in UCKK6. So IPv6 multicast data (like Windows Client Backup traffic) will cause the wifi chip to fire lots of wakeup interrupts. The problem is that out of 10-20 complaints about wifi battery life in KK6, only two people have provided the requested Wireshark captures to narrow down the problem so far.

    A lot of people are doing fine with KK6, but the general known problems are:
    1) Bluetooth HID (keyboards/mice) is 100% broken
    2) Lots of wifi compatibility problems - if you have a Belkin router, don't update. Actually, a better solution is to throw the router in the trash. Belkin sucks.
    3) This wifi battery drain issue - doesn't affect too many people, but it clearly affects people not affected on UCKH7.