Help What is 'Held Awake' in Battery Stats?

[Barats]

I unplugged my phone from the charger early this morning and went back to sleep for a couple hours. Woke up and my battery drained 12 percent with no use at all. Check the stats and see phone was 'held awake' for almost the whole time and seems to explain the drop. Does anyone know what is going on here? Providing a picture below. Thanks in advance.

 

[scary alien]

Pretty sure that would be wake locks held by one or more apps on your device.

Wake locks are requested by an app to keep the CPU and Android up and actively running vs. going to sleep (i.e., when the screen it off, etc.).

GSam Battery Monitor and Wakelock Detector-Save Battery are great apps to help you dig deeper into what's using your battery.

Hope that helps!

edit: LOL, I didn't even notice that your screen shot was actually from GSAM battery monitor ...the wakelock detector app should help you narrow things down, too.

 

[Barats]

Thanks man! So with the GSAM app, how do I dig deeper? I know if you click on Held Awake, it won't do anything. But if you do click on App Usage, it breaks it down on which apps are being used. Is that what you mean by digging deeper?

I will download that Wakelock app and check it out.

 

[scary alien]

Hey Barats :wavey:!

Yeah, GSAM Battery Monitor will give you a heads-up that there might be apps that are keeping a system resource awake (CPU, screen, etc.) more than you would want or expect (I don't want to characterize apps as using "too much" or "too many" wake locks since that would be dependent on the app and it's normal usage).

So, I'd use GSAM Battery Monitor as your first step (which you've done) and then "dig deeper" with Wakelock Detector.

When you run Wakelock Detector it will show you the awake percentage (in red) in the status bar at the top of the screen. Then, you'll see the top apps, in descending order (highest up top), of the apps using CPU and presumably only the ones using a wake lock [edit: I tested that with one of my apps that I can control whether or not it uses wake locks and that is true].

So, the top of the list that WLD presents to you is a good place to start with your candidates, again, bearing in-mind that wake locks are not "bad" but are a tool used by apps to keep some resource (like the CPU) alive and kicking so that it can do things like syncing in the background, etc. [Gmail, Facebook, etc.].

Temporarily uninstalling a top offending user app and then observing how or if the battery is now draining might tell you if that app was indeed consuming more resources than you would like.

Hope that helps and best of luck!

 

[Barats]

Sorry for the late reply but need your help Scary Alien. Or anyone who can. Gsam really didn't tell me too much so I downloaded Wakelock Detector as recommended but needed a little help reading it. Can you point me to which apps are causing it to stay awake? I feel 75% is a bit high to be awake and my battery is draining even when I have the screen off. Here is a posted screenshot. Thanks in advance.

 

[scary alien]

Can you point me to which apps are causing it to stay awake? I feel 75% is a bit high to be awake and my battery is draining even when I have the screen off.

Hey Barats, sorry for the delayed reply...

I'll quote myself from the post above re. using WLD:

When you run Wakelock Detector it will show you the awake percentage (in red) in the status bar at the top of the screen. Then, you'll see the top apps, in descending order (highest up top), of the apps using CPU and presumably only the ones using a wake lock [edit: I tested that with one of my apps that I can control whether or not it uses wake locks and that is true].

So, the top of the list that WLD presents to you is a good place to start with your candidates, again, bearing in-mind that wake locks are not "bad" but are a tool used by apps to keep some resource (like the CPU) alive and kicking so that it can do things like syncing in the background, etc. [Gmail, Facebook, etc.].

Temporarily uninstalling a top offending user app and then observing how or if the battery is now draining might tell you if that app was indeed consuming more resources than you would like.

So, from your images you included, it looks like WLD has already highlighted your top culprits in red:

Clock (do you have a lot of alarms set?)
Messaging (SMS)
Facebook (probably doing a lot of syncing)
BeautifulWidgets
Samsung Push Service​

 

[Barats]

Thanks!

Well I have no idea what Samsung Push Service is or what is using it? I try force stopping it and it just restarts itself. Is it Samsung bloatware? I don't even see why it's being used so much.

I've never seemed to have an issue with Beautiful Widgets before. I've been using that since I had the Evo. I use it for their custom clocks. Should I maybe uninstall that?

I get Messaging. Facebook as well, although is there a way for it not to pull data constantly when the screen is off without logging out?

Yeah I may do some trail and error. See what happens when I temporarily uninstall Facebook and Beautiful Widgets.

And if you knew how to stop the Push Service without rooting that would be great.

Thanks for the help.

 

[girolez]

Hi

Those "held awake" times are not enough to cause an issue. 75% is very high. Have you got your playstore set to automatically update apps this can cause very high usage as soon as wifi becomes connected. Have you tried disabling wifi when you are not using the phone? (It seems to be permanently on - in itself the radio idle wont use much battery, but if its downloading there will be high consumption) Apps such as Juice defender can give fine control over data use, screen brightness and battery consumption.

Samsung Push allows samsung to update system apps such as S planner, S note (which are not in the playstore)

Do:
menu button
settings
app manager
right hand "all" tab at the top
scroll down to samsung push service
press disable

Roger

 

[Barats]

So I decided to do a restart. Pulled the battery. Cleared the cache. Used CleanupMaster to clean up a little more. And now the battery is working fine. Went from being Awake at 80% to 4%. Is this just something I have to do every now and then? Does not restarting the phone for awhile make the battery drain?