[REF] Known identified battery drainers

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Entropy512

Senior Recognized Developer
Aug 31, 2007
14,088
25,086
Owego, NY
ok, so I did try this to an extent, i would disable 4 apps at a time for the most part, only apps, none of the red items like wifi manager and stuff like that (even though i did try that at a different date)

I had no success.. I went back to stock, uninstalled all bloatware, at&t live TV, my account, bar scanner, all that bs, right now I have BBS, Cpu Spy and titanium, only apps that are not stock and are in the list of installed apps. I am still getting this issue!! could it be that I have poor service (though this never affected the iphone this badly) I lose 40% overnight though and it seems odd to me that would be because of low service..
Doesn't look like low service - you were on wifi, so data was going over wifi.

Top three wakelocks were wlan_rx_wake, svnet, and mmc_delayed_work

wlan_rx_wake is a dead ringer for network traffic. This wakelock happens when your phone receives a network packet addressed to it and it's asleep. So incoming network traffic is waking your phone often.
svnet is unusually high - usually this is fairly low, as it's basic radio management stuff (Edit: low service MIGHT have driven this one up)
svnet-dormancy is almost nonexistent - this is what you will usually see when an app is driving network traffic via cell data
mmc_delayed_work is new to me, but I'm 90% certain that it is due to some app reading/writing to storage

Nailing your culprit might need a network capture - I'm going to work on a tutorial for using Shark for Root ( https://market.android.com/details?id=lv.n3o.shark ) in a day or two.

BTW, to analyze the /proc/wakelocks dumps:
Open in Excel or OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc
Import as tab-delimited text
Add a new column called sleep_time_minutes
Set this column to equal sleep_time divided by 60e9 - this converts nanoseconds to minutes
Sort by sleep_time_minutes
 
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penskyc

Senior Member
Oct 11, 2011
124
11
SoFla
Doesn't look like low service - you were on wifi, so data was going over wifi.

Top three wakelocks were wlan_rx_wake, svnet, and mmc_delayed_work

wlan_rx_wake is a dead ringer for network traffic. This wakelock happens when your phone receives a network packet addressed to it and it's asleep. So incoming network traffic is waking your phone often.
svnet is unusually high - usually this is fairly low, as it's basic radio management stuff (Edit: low service MIGHT have driven this one up)
svnet-dormancy is almost nonexistent - this is what you will usually see when an app is driving network traffic via cell data
mmc_delayed_work is new to me, but I'm 90% certain that it is due to some app reading/writing to storage

Nailing your culprit might need a network capture - I'm going to work on a tutorial for using Shark for Root ( https://market.android.com/details?id=lv.n3o.shark ) in a day or two.

BTW, to analyze the /proc/wakelocks dumps:
Open in Excel or OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc
Import as tab-delimited text
Add a new column called sleep_time_minutes
Set this column to equal sleep_time divided by 60e9 - this converts nanoseconds to minutes
Sort by sleep_time_minutes

any update on a tutorialfor shark reader and shark for root? i would really like to nail this down, thought i did, but than realized that the battery icon for Serendipity is kinda made to make it look like u have better life, I was at 54% but my battery basically looked like it was at 80%.. Left my phone off the charger last night and it droped 30% in 8 hours of idle.. ughhhh!
 

mcorrie1121

Senior Member
Jul 4, 2007
680
30
Oregon
Update for WWF. Didn't explicitly say it fixed battery drain, but has anyone seen improvement?

EDIT: Went in, played a move, exited, and went to kill the task just to find it killed itself. Seems like it won't run in the background anymore.

That's a start.
 

cheesekake

Member
Oct 22, 2011
21
2
Colorado Springs
Sorry this has taken me a while to post, I was going to post it last weekend, however I exchanged my phone to see if it helped with battery life. It actually got worse!

I pulled my phone off of the charger at 1pm, it is now 5:04 pm. I have sent one text and had the screen on for less than a few minutes and I am down to 82% battery. I'm running Unnamed ROM with the custom Kernel.

The attached screenshots are only for a couple of hours because I accidentally rebooted, but that is how it typically looks even after running for 12+ hours.

Here is my wakelocks and dmesg files. I would appreciate it if you could take a look for me and give me some insight!

Thanks in advance!
 

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Dxtra

Senior Member
May 27, 2010
497
40
For those with horrible battery life I'll suggest factory reset, and carefully installing and monitoring each market app at a time. 95% of the time market apps are the enemy here. Be careful on what you install.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using xda premium
 

Adelaide.

Senior Member
Feb 25, 2010
223
40
Friendster caused issues for me. I installed and uninstalled it before I had CPUspy and BBS and all that, so I don't have any numbers to show, but it was causing a wakelock. After I installed it the battery usage screen showed my phone awake almost the whole time the screen was off.
 

jm1280

Senior Member
Sep 29, 2011
62
5
Lexington
Sorry this has taken me a while to post, I was going to post it last weekend, however I exchanged my phone to see if it helped with battery life. It actually got worse!

I pulled my phone off of the charger at 1pm, it is now 5:04 pm. I have sent one text and had the screen on for less than a few minutes and I am down to 82% battery. I'm running Unnamed ROM with the custom Kernel.

The attached screenshots are only for a couple of hours because I accidentally rebooted, but that is how it typically looks even after running for 12+ hours.

Here is my wakelocks and dmesg files. I would appreciate it if you could take a look for me and give me some insight!

Thanks in advance!

Having the same issue, high Android OS usage. Just swapped out the battery to see if that helps. Going to pull wakelocks today and post up.
 
Battery Life

There is so much talk in these forums here about battery life so after a lot of
thought I had an idea to investigate how much the externel sdcard drains the
battery in our phones.

After an hour of searching I found many very technical information about this
but none which were specific enough to give me an idea of exactly how much
the external sdcard really drains the battery.

All along I knew that just by simply plugging in an external sdcard into the
phone or a computer the power consumption increases.
(even if the phone's screen times-out.)

Then I came accross an article which was specific enough about this topic and
which even I could understand.
smile.gif


So here is the bottom line:

When we plug a flash drive into the computer and not even access the flash drive
it still consumes a certain amount of milliamps as long as it remains plugged in
and the computer is powered on.

All external micro sdcards or any other kinds of sdcards just like any external
hard drives plugged into the computer use power and drain the battery, in cell
phones even if the phone is in stand-by mode or sleep mode.

In standby mode the micro sdcard drains the battery anywhere from 0.3mA to
0.6mA depending on the speed, brand, and quality of the sdcard.

The amount of battery drain increases more than 20 times while the sdcard is
being addressed and accessed to read or write.

If we multiply 0.6mA times 24 hours the amount of battery drain is 14.4mA
which means that if we do nothing at all with the phone it will drain an
additional 14.4mA every 24 hours just by having the micro sdcard plugged
into the phone.

So if our battery has a full charge of 1650mA you can see that the amount of
drain is not a lot but if we want to conserve the most battery life possible
then even a 14.4mA drain every 24 hours might be of concern to some of us.

What do YOU think?
 
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Entropy512

Senior Recognized Developer
Aug 31, 2007
14,088
25,086
Owego, NY
Our MMC controller gets shut off along with everything else when deep sleep is entered.

It is a tiny, miniscule, insignificant drop in the bucket unless an app is misbehaving and writing to the internal or external SD cards way too much. (This will show up as lots of mmc_delayed_work wakelocks consuming lots of sleep_time in /proc/wakelocks - I've seen this once or twice, always associated with high wlan_wake wakelocks, classic sign of an app driving network/SD card traffic.)
 
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dross333

Senior Member
Oct 23, 2011
81
4
Update for WWF. Didn't explicitly say it fixed battery drain, but has anyone seen improvement?

EDIT: Went in, played a move, exited, and went to kill the task just to find it killed itself. Seems like it won't run in the background anymore.

That's a start.

Glad it closes now. But this games caused my S2 to run hot.
 
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Entropy512

Senior Recognized Developer
Aug 31, 2007
14,088
25,086
Owego, NY
Maybe try using SetCPU to force the max clock down while you play.

I think there are advanced scripting tricks (like maybe Tasker) that let you automate this, but not sure.
 

m0biusace

Senior Member
May 16, 2006
146
30
Maybe try using SetCPU to force the max clock down while you play.

I think there are advanced scripting tricks (like maybe Tasker) that let you automate this, but not sure.

This is a good idea. At 1.4ghz the phone gets extremely hot while playing Sentinel for any longer than half an hour. at 800mhz the game still runs smoothly without heating up.
 

penskyc

Senior Member
Oct 11, 2011
124
11
SoFla
Entropy512, is it safe to post a pcap file here? or does it have sensitive information? I am looking at it in wire shark and dont really know what I am looking for, I do my HTPC/server showing up alot as a SSDP protocol which seems to be related to a UPNP server, which could also be related to my Plex Media Server or iSedora media server.. I also see some UDP destination port 32412, plex port is 32400 so I am assuming it may be related to my plex server somehow.. ( I do have a plex app, but it doesnt always stay connected or anything like that)
 

Entropy512

Senior Recognized Developer
Aug 31, 2007
14,088
25,086
Owego, NY
Entropy512, is it safe to post a pcap file here? or does it have sensitive information? I am looking at it in wire shark and dont really know what I am looking for, I do my HTPC/server showing up alot as a SSDP protocol which seems to be related to a UPNP server, which could also be related to my Plex Media Server or iSedora media server.. I also see some UDP destination port 32412, plex port is 32400 so I am assuming it may be related to my plex server somehow.. ( I do have a plex app, but it doesnt always stay connected or anything like that)

Normally no, but it depends on how it was captured. Wireshark has an option to capture the first N bytes of a packet - 68 is enough to catch all IP and TCP or UDP headers, and identify the protocols used, while having a fairly low risk of exposing personal information.

A full capture - posting that would be inadvised.

This issue is why I still haven't posted a Shark for Root tutorial, I need to make sure, without a doubt, that it can do the packet truncation stuff, both for privacy and file size reasons.

Sent from my GT-P7510 using Tapatalk
 

jm1280

Senior Member
Sep 29, 2011
62
5
Lexington
Could someone please look my wakelocks and see if anything is out of sorts?
 

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Adelaide.

Senior Member
Feb 25, 2010
223
40
Maybe try using SetCPU to force the max clock down while you play.

I think there are advanced scripting tricks (like maybe Tasker) that let you automate this, but not sure.

I've been looking into this becuase I love words with friends and I hate what it does to my battery. As far as I can find yes you can downclock the CPU for specific apps using tasker, but you have to use a couple other apps along with it. It is discussed here about 1/2 way down the page.


I found another battery drainer I think. It may be this is a known issue and I'm just not aware of it becuase I'm so new to android. When I switched to Launcher pro I left my TW screens configured (all 7 of them). I noticed that I was getting wakelocks from widget programs I wasn't even running and it dawned on me that those widgets were present on the TW launcher screens. I cleared them all off and I did not get any wakelocks from those programs today.
 
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mcorrie1121

Senior Member
Jul 4, 2007
680
30
Oregon
Anyone had issues with GPS Status? After about 15% overall battery used today, it was at about 16% itself despite me not using it in days.
 

dandrumheller

Senior Member
Jul 10, 2010
3,625
1,137
Southern Maine / Seacoast NH
Anyone had issues with GPS Status? After about 15% overall battery used today, it was at about 16% itself despite me not using it in days.

Yes, saw similar behaviour the first couple days I had the phone. Just deleted the app since I have had no problems with GPS on this device, so no troubleshooting by me.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using Tapatalk
 

vladm7

Senior Member
Oct 8, 2011
369
83
Chicagoland
I had wakelocks issue with K9 mail app. By default it uses push for receiving new email. I get moderate number of emails daily and I noticed that my phone spends too much time woke up with K9 being the reason. There is a report that K9 doesn't let the phone go for at least a minute after each push notification.

Things go back normal after I disabled push, switched to poll every hour and only first-level imap folders. Also increased default value imap-idle refresh timeout.

hope this will help others.

-- vlad
 
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  • 73
    In many cases, people who have battery drain issues have a tendency to end up being found to be using a known battery draining app or configuration. To help these people, I'm going to try to start a list here. I will, in the case of known rogue apps, include the reporting date so people can try updates to see if drain is fixed. (For example, Facebook is rarely a culprit any more, but it was the #1 most common battery eater in 2010.) The primary focus here will be things that shouldn't drain your battery but do.

    Firmware bugs:
    1. The UCKK6 OTA update contains a number of issues with wifi and bluetooth. Among these is that an oddball feature of our Wifi/Bluetooth chipset goes nuts and wakes up the phone once per second intermittently. Rebooting temporarily fixes it, turning off wifi temporarily fixes it, only permanent fix is to ditch UCKK6. http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1409513 for more details - Appears as a variant of the Android OS "bug" - this is the only one that is actually 100% a firmware bug. International XWKK5 is also affected.

    LAN Environment (WiFi):
    • Broadcast LAN traffic can wake your wifi chip often. This also manifests as the Android OS "bug", but it's a small problem with the firmware base (XXKI3 and UCKK6 are known to be affected) and mostly a network problem. Examples I've seen so far include:
      • Windows Client Backup
      • UPnP (DLNA) SSDP
      • Dropbox Lan Sync Discovery Protocol
      • Buggy piece-of-**** routers that spam lots of ARP requests continuously - The 2Wire routers that are required for UVerse access apparently fit in this category.
    You are more likely to have the above issue on some firmware bases than others. For example, XXKI3 disables all of the chip's packet filters, making it vulnerable to this sort of thing. UCKH7 and XWKL1 don't, leading to significantly improved life on "dirty" networks. UCKK6 almost surely also has the same problem.

    Configuration issues:
    1. Hotmail calendar sync
    2. Misconfigured Microsoft Exchange servers - 1) is a special case of this. At least one person has reported that calendar sync to a non-Hotmail account was problematic for them, but email sync was OK
    3. A bad Exchange configuration - the client apparently goes nuts if it can't contact the server
    4. BLN - On Galaxy S II devices, there is no stable BLN implementation that does not hold a wakelock when a notification is active. This means that an active BLN notification will drain about 4-5%/hour. I say this in bold letters in my kernel thread, but somehow people still don't realize it...

    Rogue apps:
    1. Words with Friends (October 2011)
    2. Skype (October 2011) - Particularly insidious, as it does not directly hold a wakelock. However, it causes lots of background network activity, and this activity keeps your phone awake. Since most of the time is spent wakelocked in the network stack, Skype drain shows as Android OS.
    3. Any IM app that works similarly to Skype is likely to have the same issues.
    4. AP Mobile Widget on stock AT&T ROMs - this one also blows through your data allotment quickly if you don't have unlimited data
    5. AT&T Smart WiFi can sometimes hold excessive wakelocks - this is why AT&T bloat is bad for you.

    The Obvious:
    1. 3D or animation/action-intensive games

    The Rare:
    Apps that occasionally go nuts, but not frequently
    1. Facebook - I've had it wakelock me once, and also, Facebook chat may have triggered my first obvious "AOS bug" episode once - so far, it's been responsible for drain once this month
    2. StartingAlertService - some sort of Calendar notification related bug

    The False Blame:
    1. GPS Status and Toolbox - may appear to be high-drain but is actually not draining - this is an Android battery reporting bug - see http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=23106668&postcount=491 for more details. Thank you for the info and the great app rhornig.

    If you're having battery drain issues, I suggest the following:
    1. Install BetterBatteryStats. The XDA edition from the author's thread on these forums is free. (Market version is paid.)
    2. Also, having CPUSpy to see deep sleep percentages is VERY useful
    3. BBS now shows kernel wakelocks - make sure to check these. If you have an older version that doesn't show kernel wakelocks, use the instructions below.

    Get ADB up and running (Google it, and if you're on Windows, Googling Droid Explorer may help)
    Using ADB, do the following:
    Code:
    adb shell cat /proc/wakelocks > wakelocks.txt
    adb shell dmesg > dmesg.txt
    Zip em' up and post em' here for analysis.

    Edit: Specifically, to get a good baseline measurement of idle drain - make sure to have CPUSpy installed for this procedure:
    Charge phone to full
    Reboot
    Reset timers in CPUSpy, otherwise the percentages and bars will be wacky
    Let the phone sit for a while - Overnight is best. Then provide data:

    Deep sleep percentage
    Time the phone was sitting
    Percentage battery drained
    I don't need screenshots of the above, just the numbers. Screenshots use up massive amounts of thread space
    Grab /proc/wakelocks as mentioned above and post it, OR use BetterBatteryStats 1.4 or above to pull kernel wakelocks.

    Note: If you're at or below 1%/hour idle drain, not much point of posting your wakelocks.

    If you have high wlan_wake, wlan_rx_wake, or svnet-dormancy wakelock times, then you have an app eating data or one of the wifi wakeup bugs described above. Install Shark for Root - https://market.android.com/details?id=lv.n3o.shark

    Start it, and change parameters from:
    Code:
    -vv -s 0
    to
    Code:
    -vv -s 68
    This tells it to only capture the first 68 bytes of each packet, which is all we need for this purpose. This provides two benefits: A smaller capture, and privacy for you. (It captures packet headers but not contents)
    Then start a capture and let it sit for a bit.

    Note that your drain will be higher during the capture than normal - we're collecting data here, not directly nuking the drain.

    After a while where you are positive you are encountering drain, stop Shark and then pull the .pcap file - load it in Wireshark on your PC or post it here. If you post it here, MAKE SURE you have a truncated capture as instructed above!
    10
    I just confirmed - multipdp is the new name for svnet-dormancy - same 6000ms wakelock timer.
    6
    GPS Status and Toolbox - battery usage

    Hi all,

    I'm the author of GPS Status and Toolbox mentioned also on the first post.

    I'm receiving several complaints about the battery issue and investigated the reports, because GPS Status was designed explicitly NOT to run in background. It does not have services, alarms, does not start at boot. In fact once you close it, it cannot be activated without user interaction.

    Also it was strange people were reporting excessive use when they have not used the app at all. Here are my findings:

    It seems that the battery measurement routines are buggy in android (ICS still has this bug). The battery measurement service registers when an app starts using a sensor, but sometimes forgets to unregister this when the app releases it. (even if you kill the app's process). When the battery use is displayed the battery screen calculates the battery use by adding up the different ways a program can consume the battery (CPU, GPS, network radio use, and sensor use). The sensor use is basically calculated by subtracting the last sensor start value from the current time and the difference is multiplied by the sensors power requirement (per second). Because the system does not de-registers the sensor use correctly some programs are treated as using the sensors while in fact they are not even existing as a running process. As time passes this 'phantom' battery use grows even relative to the rest of the system's power use.

    In short this means that when the device is in sleep mode and consumes almost no battery, the calculation assumes that the sensors are still running. This results in increasing battery use reports for apps that use sensors.

    This does not happen always, but I was able to reproduce it with practically any app that uses several sensors. The effect is most visible on Samsung phones because I guess samsung assigns higher power requirement values for the ensors than other vendors.

    Long story short, DO NOT trust the battery usage display. It may give you an indication, but it is just a guess. (however seeing the code, the CPU usage statistics seems to come from the kernel so they are much more reliable).

    As a rule of thumb, higher battery use should come with higher CPU use. If you see high battery use for a task that hast consumed only low amount of CPU then chances are that the battery use is not correctly displayed.

    Hope this helps
    6
    I'm one of those people that really encourages people to search and try to help themselves. I'm probably even more sarcastic about it than most (though not in a mean way... just in a sarcastic way ;))

    However, the link you just posted was WORSE than useless. Unless a person is familiar with both the linux kernel AND the modifications android makes to the kernel, a link to a source file from the kernel does what? It will only create more questions.

    Even someone that is familiar with the kernel and android, and even an expert in C, would get questions from that link...

    Here's what I got from that source file: There's a symbol exported from the kernel (available to modules, etc) that allows both kernel and non-kernel code to call "destroy_wake_lock()" and if that happens, the stats on the destroyed wake lock are added in to some global "deleted_wake_locks" structure.

    This doesn't make clear if the kernel deleted_wake_locks structure is the same thing as displayed in BBS. It also, perhaps misleadingly, implies that every single wakelock in the system is eventually destroyed and all the time for those old wakelocks is added to the deleted_wake_locks. That would, in turn, lead logically to the question of "so if GPS is causing a wakelock, then I turn off the GPS, does the time for that wakelock show up as a GPS wakelock, in deleted wakelocks, both or neither?" We might even get people assuming that BBS wakelock stats are useless, as all the wakelocks have to eventually get destroyed, and if they do, their stats will just get dumped into this huge meaningless "deleted" pool.

    (Of course, I have the ability to dig deeper into this and find the answers - but most people don't. Even most of the people who develop for android are NOT proficient in C and kernel issues.)

    So... was that link supposed to be some kind of answer, or something to encourage more questions?

    :)

    Gary
    4
    ok, so I did try this to an extent, i would disable 4 apps at a time for the most part, only apps, none of the red items like wifi manager and stuff like that (even though i did try that at a different date)

    I had no success.. I went back to stock, uninstalled all bloatware, at&t live TV, my account, bar scanner, all that bs, right now I have BBS, Cpu Spy and titanium, only apps that are not stock and are in the list of installed apps. I am still getting this issue!! could it be that I have poor service (though this never affected the iphone this badly) I lose 40% overnight though and it seems odd to me that would be because of low service..
    Doesn't look like low service - you were on wifi, so data was going over wifi.

    Top three wakelocks were wlan_rx_wake, svnet, and mmc_delayed_work

    wlan_rx_wake is a dead ringer for network traffic. This wakelock happens when your phone receives a network packet addressed to it and it's asleep. So incoming network traffic is waking your phone often.
    svnet is unusually high - usually this is fairly low, as it's basic radio management stuff (Edit: low service MIGHT have driven this one up)
    svnet-dormancy is almost nonexistent - this is what you will usually see when an app is driving network traffic via cell data
    mmc_delayed_work is new to me, but I'm 90% certain that it is due to some app reading/writing to storage

    Nailing your culprit might need a network capture - I'm going to work on a tutorial for using Shark for Root ( https://market.android.com/details?id=lv.n3o.shark ) in a day or two.

    BTW, to analyze the /proc/wakelocks dumps:
    Open in Excel or OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc
    Import as tab-delimited text
    Add a new column called sleep_time_minutes
    Set this column to equal sleep_time divided by 60e9 - this converts nanoseconds to minutes
    Sort by sleep_time_minutes