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Background app eating up battery.

I own a XT720 rooted and CPU overclocked, just did that today.
However for the last week or so I noticed something is eating up my battery life.

When I go to sleep i leave my device with screen off and locked, when I first got it it would eat no battery life at all within but now with in 8 hours it chews up 20% of my battery life in the night.

I keep sync turned off however I see this in the status bar once in a while, actually often, several times with in 30 min , I'm thinking this is what is eating up the batter.

Sync: Update Started...
Prefetch Image: Update Complete...

Can anyone shine some light on this, or what app/service could be doing this?

Thanks
 
@JunBringer
I thought about that but I still want to find which app is the culprit.

@GoldenBulletXD
I overclocked to get better device performance, and to be honest it is really noticeable.
It no longer studders, and the interface is more responsive, I can't go back now.
The battery drainage problem started prior to that.

@Z3US
I have two running services which I suspect, SyncEngineService which I have no idea which app uses it and it looks like the Android sync service for gmail contacts, picasa... etc. But I keep this disabled.
There is also the Ping Chat service, that might be responsible.
We should compare installed apps.
I just hope the culprit isn't the os being 2.1 for both of us.
 
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Go get Watchdog Task Manager Lite - Android app on AppBrain.

It will monitor your CPU usage and alert you to misbehaving apps.

Thanks for the recommendation. I've been using that and love it but to no avail in this situation. It does alert me to apps which are freaking out, but doesn't much help with something which is just doing constant little things which is my theory as to what's happening.

I also think it must be something I've downloaded recently, but I can't figure out what it is. I wish I could get a time stamp indicating when I downloaded / updated apps. That could be useful.
 
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Very bad advice. Pain killers might make a broken leg feel better, but it only masks the real problem while it gets worse.

Find the problem first and then take a reasoned course of action, which may include the limited use of a task killer (read referenced article above).


^

Totally agree with this. Here is a run down of a similar post I made on another topic.

I think like many have said, you are best off doing some diagnostics as to what is causing the problem. A task killer will just force close an app, that could easily just re-open, and you don't know which one it is. Look at it this way, if your front door was damaged and you had to slam it to shut it, what would be better? Slam it every day? Or get it repaired, so it doesn't jam?

A task killer is just forcing an application to close, simple as that. But the root of the problem will still exist, and you are just preventing the inevitable.

A few tools to help you do this (I am sure there are hundreds more too, but this will give you a good idea)

- JuicePlotter - This will plot a graph of your battery use. It is best to use it for a cycle of say 24-36 hours to get a good graph. (Note: I wouldn't recommend running this constantly, as it will lag up, as it will continue to plot data consistently until you wipe it/stop it). It will tell you when 3G, WiFI, GPS etc is running. Is something strange happening over night? Why? Is it a sudden drop in battery, or is it a gradual? Is it anymore than how your battery decreases during daily use?

Here is an example graph (taken from the market)

screen


- SpareParts - This will help you identify what is using your battery. You can breakdown Apps, WiFi, 3G, GPS, Screen Wake Up Time, etc etc. A bit like the built in system battery information, but will tell you a bit more.

- TrafficStats - This will help with data. If a particular app is using data overnight, it will naturally use battery. Another good diagnostic tool.

- SystemPanel - (Note: There is a lite version, which will give you some basic info, but the paid version will help much more). This will help identify specifc apps, CPU useage etc etc. Worth paying for imo, as a great app and only
 
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I haven't found the app responsible yet but I do have a workaround. It's lame but it works. I changed my power profile to "Performance" and my charge was at 90% when I woke up. My guess is something is trying to get to the net and since wifi sleeps when using the Nighttime profile, it just keeps trying, killing the battery. With Performance wifi remains awake and the annoying app is able to do whatever it is trying to do.

Somewhat counter intuitive but it's a band-aid.
 
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Thanks for the recommendation. I've been using that and love it but to no avail in this situation. It does alert me to apps which are freaking out, but doesn't much help with something which is just doing constant little things which is my theory as to what's happening.

I also think it must be something I've downloaded recently, but I can't figure out what it is. I wish I could get a time stamp indicating when I downloaded / updated apps. That could be useful.

Download SystemPanel from the app store. You can set up monitoring and get a graph of times when apps or processes are using a lot of CPU.
 
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Thanks YMark just bought the full version of the app, first impression of it is good seems very thorough and well designed, I like the application archive feature too.
Started monitoring for 1 day, let you know how it goes.

EDIT: Just to add to this last night my battery dropped from 90% to 50% this morning.
Juiceplotter showed about 10% every 2 hours or so.
 
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