[Q] Nexus S CPU usage and battery life on 4.0.4 ICS

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arr555

Member
Dec 6, 2011
9
0
GNS, i9023
o2 UK
ICS 4.0.4
rooted
UP TO 14H


using 3g inet -about 1.5h
wifi - 30mins
few photos

no music, no calls, all time on 2g network

is the 14hours okay?
 
Last edited:

anglergab

Member
Apr 14, 2012
46
15
Budapest
If you are in an area with poor GSM/UMTS signal coverage, then maintaining a continuous GSM/UMTS connection can consume far more power than otherwise. The radio will operate on much higher transmission power levels.

In fact, ususally the half of the battery-energy is consumed by the GSM/UMTS radio, while the other half by staying alive the core electronic parts (phone idle) while in idle state, not awake.

You can save a lot power by disabling UMTS (3G) functionality if you don't need/use it.
3G consumes more power than 2G (GSM). Thus if you don't have a data plan, you should set 2G mode only.

The most power is consumed by the display (particularly S-LCD). You can save some power through minimizing backlight brightness.

Some apps can make wakelocks, which means the phone cannot enter suspend state. Or while in suspend state, it can wake up for extended periods, using the CPU but not the display. If an app has the corresponding permission (wakelock), then it can make the phone fully awake at ANY time, without you'll ever note it.

Auto-sync consumes significant power too. So if you don't need it, you should disable it, particularly photo sync (in Settings). The Gallery app and its indexing process can take much battery power.

If an app wakes your phone frequently, then the best you can do is removing it (and searching for another app, which doesn't wake unnecessarily your phone). Remember: stopping an app from starting after boot won't help: apps can start and run anytime (in response to triggers).

After disabling unneeded services, processes, syncs, and removing apps, always make sure you reboot cleanly your phone ("cleanly" means that you shouldn't use the Reboot option in some custom roms, because it won't make a proper restart: thus you should power off then on your phone).
 

timetosave

Member
May 25, 2012
27
6
San Francisco
How could you confirm that the photo sync with Gallery is using a lot of battery? Would it be reported separately or would it show up under Android System or Android OS?
 

chronophase1

Senior Member
Mar 12, 2011
919
163
Should show up as gallery in the battery usage chart. Check the data usage also. I usually let it sync once and just disable it if I'm flashing a ROM and forget to do it beforehand.
 

vyszard

Member
Aug 18, 2011
8
0
Issue Confirmed

I have similar problem with chillerz here, if not worse. I got my Nexus S about a week ago and I upgrade it to ICS right after it, so I don't know how is the battery performance and CPU usage in Gingerbread.

But overall my Nexus S only lasts 3,5-5 hours, with occasional browsing, facebook, 1-2 calls, sms and whatsapp. And maybe a little game. But only a little. In that 4 hours, I only got 2 hours of screen on time, which is not normal, according to other's experience. What bothers me though, just like chillerz said, is that the CPU runs full speed on 1000MHz most of the time, with system_server as the highest demanding process.

What I tried:
1. There is a bug report about high CPU usage of system_server if auto-rotate is on. I tried to turn auto-rotate off then, but nothing changed, I still got my CPU sprinting all the time.
2. Draining the battery completely and then charged it until it was full. Nope, still bad battery.
3. Turn USB debugging on, like some people in similar thread suggested, but still no luck.

I haven't tried to do factory reset though, since I really want to avoid that if I can. I don't want to get through the whole process of installing app and setting things again. And also it is not yet proven to solve the problem.

Or maybe I just got myself a bad device?
 

chronophase1

Senior Member
Mar 12, 2011
919
163
I would start by disabling FB as its a known battery killer. If you don't have betterbatterystats, grab that as well. You said you didn't factory reset before your update. Most of your problems could probably be eliminated by doing so. Last resort, but you may have to do it. Sucks, but it may be worth it.

Sent by pocket technology
 

chronophase1

Senior Member
Mar 12, 2011
919
163
Its been a while since I've used it now. There's a dedicated thread for it. But basically what I did was check out the partial wakelocks section to see what was causing my phone to stay awake. In my case, it was Android System. But because of the app, it helped me narrow down what exactly what in the android system was causing it. There's an FAQ in the application, but your best bet is to hit up the thread. It's always active.

Sent by pocket technology
 

ykphuah

Senior Member
Dec 17, 2009
417
38
Thanks for responding!

I do have betterbaterrystats (now), but honestly I don't understand as to what I should looking for there. Can you explain more about that please?

For me it was Settings->Location Services->Google's Location Service.

Once I turned that off, while leaving latitude signed on, and gps on, wifi on, 3g on. My battery life improved significantly.

You need to open the Partial Wakelock screen on BetterBatteryStats, then sort it by Count.
 

chronophase1

Senior Member
Mar 12, 2011
919
163
I have that ticked and never have any wakelocks from it:confused:. I thought that was only used when requested. I have it for using News and Weather. I also use Autostarts though, so that might be why Maps never fires it up unless I do it manually.
 

vyszard

Member
Aug 18, 2011
8
0
Okay so betterbatterystats showed me the main culprit (by far compare to others) for partial wakelock is "AlarmManager". What does it do? Can I turn it off?
 

meatty

Member
Jul 3, 2012
12
0
battery life sucks

Hi,

I've been a lurker on XDA for a while, and recently, I've had a problem with my battery. When I upgraded from Stock GB (unlocked/ rooted) to stock ICS, my battery went from reasonable to unusable. Since that time, I've changed my ROM and my Kernel (currently running Matr1x and AOKP), and calibrated my battery. I've tried some of the things in this and other threads (force stopping programs, turning off location services, bluetooth), to no avail. I got BetterBatteryStats and did what they recommend over in the BBS forum - I charged it overnight, then unplugged it and let it collect stats for a while.

I attached the BBS file over in the BBS forum (attached here for you to see what they saw) and during the 1 h 43 m that this dump file was created, my battery went from 100% to 84% without turning on the screen except to create the dump file.

When I posted over in the BBS forum, they said to uninstall facebook, gmail and turn off wifi and autosync. I'm not too concerned about facebook, but turning off gmail and autosync are non-starters - I'd rather go back to GB than lose those functionalities.

They suggested trying a different ROM. I'm currently on AOKP ROM and Matr1x Kernel. Can anyone suggest a kernel and/or ICS rom that will give me reasonable battery life?

Nexus S I9020A
 

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chronophase1

Senior Member
Mar 12, 2011
919
163
Yeah. Mine isn't much better to be honest. Its a hit or miss with life on ics it seems. I haven't changed my usage habits too much between my phones and the Nexus is pretty bad. Then again, my G1 was much much worse. Lol. You can try doing a factory reset if you're willing to deal with downloading your apps all over again and setting everything back up. When I rocked Matr1x, I used a screen off profile that helped a little bit. Lionheart around 800 Max and screen off I think I had Wheatley set to 400.

Sent by pocket technology.
 

polobunny

Senior Member
Oct 25, 2011
6,223
2,312
Montreal
Hi,

I've been a lurker on XDA for a while, and recently, I've had a problem with my battery. When I upgraded from Stock GB (unlocked/ rooted) to stock ICS, my battery went from reasonable to unusable. Since that time, I've changed my ROM and my Kernel (currently running Matr1x and AOKP), and calibrated my battery. I've tried some of the things in this and other threads (force stopping programs, turning off location services, bluetooth), to no avail. I got BetterBatteryStats and did what they recommend over in the BBS forum - I charged it overnight, then unplugged it and let it collect stats for a while.

I attached the BBS file over in the BBS forum (attached here for you to see what they saw) and during the 1 h 43 m that this dump file was created, my battery went from 100% to 84% without turning on the screen except to create the dump file.

When I posted over in the BBS forum, they said to uninstall facebook, gmail and turn off wifi and autosync. I'm not too concerned about facebook, but turning off gmail and autosync are non-starters - I'd rather go back to GB than lose those functionalities.

They suggested trying a different ROM. I'm currently on AOKP ROM and Matr1x Kernel. Can anyone suggest a kernel and/or ICS rom that will give me reasonable battery life?

Nexus S I9020A

Nothing is really keeping your phone awake to be honest. Gmail has a few wakelocks, nothing abnormal though, and it's not keeping it awake for long (23s total). Same for Facebook (7s total).

You can see your phone had bluetooth on for 1h43. That's a battery drain, if you're not using it I suggest you turn it off.
Same thing for data. If you're not using it, turn it off. From the log you don't seem to have bad signal, which is good, because bad signal can kill your battery even more.

Do you use your calendar and mostly calendar syncing? It seems to have a few wakelocks, which could end up hurting your battery.


As for the kernel, are you using the latest version? v22 has much better results than the earlier ones, so that might help too. Stability prior to this wasn't super great. Otherwise I had good luck with Air kernel v4.4 and the settings in my signature. I dropped 3% in around 5 hours, arguably without doing nothing however.


I would also look into your screen brightness settings. You can always take a screenshot of your battery stats in Android to show us more.
 

meatty

Member
Jul 3, 2012
12
0
Nothing is really keeping your phone awake to be honest. Gmail has a few wakelocks, nothing abnormal though, and it's not keeping it awake for long (23s total). Same for Facebook (7s total).

You can see your phone had bluetooth on for 1h43. That's a battery drain, if you're not using it I suggest you turn it off.

Yes, I use bluetooth while in the car, but not otherwise. Is there a way to automatically turn it off, for example, when connecting to a specific wifi network? Or really any wifi network? Since I know I won't use Bluetooth while connected to wifi, that would be useful.

I did notice one interesting thing yesterday, when I was in a different car - in my car, I just have bluetooth headset functionality, but the other car I had audio, etc. that turned out to be something that really gobbled up battery, even though the only thing I used was the headset functionality. Is it possible to just use bluetooth in a restricted form (i.e. don't bother with audio sharing, just connect as a headset)?

Same thing for data. If you're not using it, turn it off. From the log you don't seem to have bad signal, which is good, because bad signal can kill your battery even more.

Not really sure I understand - I am always using data. wifi? if there's a wifi network, I definitely prefer to connect to it, rather than using the much slower 3G network.

Do you use your calendar and mostly calendar syncing? It seems to have a few wakelocks, which could end up hurting your battery.

I use it primarily for gmail, but also calendar and contacts. Sure, contacts may be able to be done daily, but I will forget to sync, and the point of the smartphone is that I don't have to remember stuff! :)

As for the kernel, are you using the latest version? v22 has much better results than the earlier ones, so that might help too. Stability prior to this wasn't super great. Otherwise I had good luck with Air kernel v4.4 and the settings in my signature. I dropped 3% in around 5 hours, arguably without doing nothing however.

I just downloaded v22 - I'll let you know if it helps.

I would also look into your screen brightness settings. You can always take a screenshot of your battery stats in Android to show us more.

I keep my brightness on auto unless I'm outside in the sun. outside in the sun I need it full up - I live in Texas and the sun is very bright... Besides, my problem is not the drain when the screen is on - it's the drain when the screen is off.

I got screenshots of the battery, as well as a couple more BBS dumps (with more realistic days), but I can't post right now - I will add them later, when I get a chance.
 

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  • 6
    Once upon a time, I too was one of the sullied - one those unfortunates souls, plagued with poor battery life on a Nexus S (stock FTW), brought on by an innocent (and joyful) upgrade to ICS 4.0.4 from 2.3.6.
    When I first discovered the trouble, with great gusto, I ran to the interwebs and dutifully followed suggestions of restarting the phone or draining the battery, but alas - it was all to no avail. There is, however, a happy ending to this story. With effort and perseverance, I've since significantly improved performance. Here is my brief tale of success.

    After the upgrade, Android (praise be its name!) decided to start, in the background, every single application on the phone. Verily Snake '97 was indeed running all the time. The horror!!! The game is entertaining certainly, but hardly worth keeping alive at the cost of other, more critical apps.
    I was not deterred and took matters into my own hands. Using Manage Apps -> All (not Manage Apps -> Running, mind you), I went about Force Stopping each application (including some Android core apps). It was tedious and frightening. I was very careful and hesitant, as you should be if you are affected by a similar malady.

    By the next day, I saw much improved battery life (hooray!), yet I wasn't free and clear. The hold of evil had not been loosened completely.
    I found within, a strange and dangerous lock (wakelock - was that its name?) keeping the Gallery in the list of active applications, even when I had not used it for some time. It refused to move to the cached apps list. Puzzled, I scratched my empty head. The interwebs were of no use this time - I was on my own.
    (cue ominous music)
    Peering within, in the Sync section I found the system was trying to sync photos on an account where the checkbox for syncing was not selected. o_O
    A quick off-on-off stopped the syncing. The app slinked off the Running apps list. Soon, I was overjoyed, for I was experiencing improved battery life!

    I've now returned to performance much closer to that from days of 2.3.6. My Nexus S' battery now reaches 40%-30% in ~16 hours, with always-on 3G, Wifi and GPS, oft use of phone, contacts, messaging, whatsapp, twitter, foursquare and browser, and infrequent use of music, market, maps, camera and rarer usage of games like Angry Birds (which consumes vast amounts of battery) and gallery.

    All is well with the universe.

    Certainly, this tale may or may not be a mirror to your own. Should you be experiencing similar problems, I hope my tale brings you solace, and provides a means to the end of your troubles.
    3
    The average battery should last along the lines of 4 - 5 hours worth of screen on time. Whether this is playing a game or browsing around hasn't made more than that much difference for me. 1% every 5 minutes would give you ~8 hours of screen on time, a feat very few (aLNG, looking at you) have been able to do without an extended battery. Anything more than this is not going to happen while maintaining a cell signal and watching videos. You may have been exaggerating the time on battery in the past.

    Go to Settings --> Developer options --> Show CPU usage and tick it. Leave the phone sitting there with the screen on for a bit and let me know what the top CPU users are.
    1
    Screen drains most the battery. If there is drain while it's off there would be some kind of wake lock preventing sleep. You likely don't have this since it seems your phone sleeps nicely, assuming you had the screen on for moat the time in that screenshot.

    The frequencies you show seem a little skewed to 1000mhz for web browsing. What cpu governor are you using, and what settings? I usually get around 40-40 between highest and lowest frequency with ondemand, 20% or less for the intermediate frequencies. This is while web browsing most of the time.
    1
    I understand the screen drains the most battery, but I feel there is an underlying issue since light usage (like reading) can drain 50% in 2 hours, whereas before I could watch 1 hour video and lose about 10%.

    I'm not sure what you mean by CPU governor and settings. I'm running the stock ICS 4.0.4 (got the OTA only a few days ago). I agree it seems skewed. It seems to use the 1000MHz frequency pretty much all the time the screen is on.

    First off, welcome to XDA!

    The fact that you're not rooted + stock could only mean that there is probably a background app running while your actively using your phone. Have you checked into Settings > Apps > Running and noticed anything peculiar? For a fact, based on everything I'm reading here there is no way your phone should be at 1000 MHz for 30% of the time. At most for my usage, my phone is in the 1000 MHz state < 10% of the time.

    If all else fails, you could always try doing a factory reset and seeing if the problem persists. If not then you can install your important apps one by one to find a culprit.

    You could also try out this nify tool: BetterBatteryStats to give you more statistics as to what is eating your battery.
    http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1179809
    1
    10 percent drain while watching a video is hard to believe.

    That would equal 10hrs to drain the battery with screen on watching a video. Which is not happening.

    Your battery drain now sounds normal. Maybe in the past it was not reporting it correctly or you're simply mistaken somehow.