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Help Phone Idle eating battery?

dhworph

Android Enthusiast
Dec 21, 2011
566
63
Used to only lose about 12% of battery overnight, now been losing almost double that with "Phone Idle" always being the top battery user.

Any ideas on why. It didn't used to do that. The only behavior I've changed since the latest official OS update is that I don't reboot before going to bed anymore. Could that be it? I'll try a fresh reboot tonight before sleeping on a full charge and see if that helps.

The problem with rebooting now is that it takes awhile for the mediaserver / downloadManager processes to stop eating battery after a fresh reboot... and then I get another drain problem if a reboot were to fix the phone idle drain problem.
 
If you updated your device via a OTA update from your carrier then sometimes a Factory Reset is in order.

Sometimes issues will occur once the phone has been upgraded, i would suggest in backing everything up and performing a factory reset. If the battery issue persists then we will need to look at other options.
 
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Ok, I finally got around to doing the FDR (through settings, so everything got wiped -- of course I backed everything up on my computer). And the phone is definitely much smoother, but phone idle still eating battery...

I haven't changed any running apps from before the 4.1.1 OTA to after it -- I generally don't have many apps running. And actually, my phone used to have 300+ apps on it, and am now down to stock apps + about 10-20 installed.

Maybe I'll have to try flashing the factory image 4.1.1... any other tricks I could try?
 
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Check your settings and see if anything defaulted to a new setting you're not expecting. Is it just the battery or is your phone also consuming data? If so it could be google data backup running in the background.

Maybe the signal is bouncing around in the middle of the night. Connect/reconnect kills battery life. Put some notification on your phone when you lose connection and reconnect. That will give you an idea if its going nuts all night long. You can test this theory out by setting your phone to wifi overnight and see what the battery level is like the next day... (just make sure your wifi connection is consistent and not on/off/on as well)
 
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I ran betterbatterystats and cpuspy last night. Phone is definitely getting plenty of deep sleep, and I'm not really sure what to look for in better batterstats logs....

BetterBatteryStats:
=========
Wakelocks
=========
SignalCollector.ScannerThread (com.google.android.apps.maps.Maps): 5 m 21 s (321 s) Count:181 1.0%
SignalCollector.Scanner (com.google.android.apps.maps.Maps): 5 m 15 s (315 s) Count:2871 1.0%
Genie (com.google.android.apps.genie.geniewidget.News & Weather): 2 m (120 s) Count:6 0.4%
AWS NW Stats (com.avast.android.mobilesecurity.avast! Mobile Security): 48 s (48 s) Count:109 0.2%
AlarmManager (Android System): 38 s (38 s) Count:668 0.1%
MediaScannerService (Media): 25 s (25 s) Count:5 0.1%
EntriesRefresh_wakelock (com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox.Google Search): 23 s (23 s) Count:93 0.1%
LocationReceiverService (com.google.android.apps.maps.Maps): 16 s (16 s) Count:1997 0.1%
AsyncCollectorListener (com.google.android.apps.maps.Maps): 12 s (12 s) Count:2682 0.0%
ActivityManager-Launch (Android System): 9 s (9 s) Count:74 0.0%
LocationPrivacyService (com.google.android.apps.maps.Maps): 7 s (7 s) Count:7 0.0%
NetworkLocationLocator (com.google.android.apps.maps.Maps): 6 s (6 s) Count:959 0.0%
NetworkLocationCallbackRunner (com.google.android.apps.maps.Maps): 5 s (5 s) Count:1811 0.0%
ConnectMQTT (com.nuance.swype.beta.Swype Beta 1.4): 5 s (5 s) Count:45 0.0%
AlarmManager (com.google.android.apps.maps.Maps): 4 s (4 s) Count:3553 0.0%
*backup* (Android System): 2 s (2 s) Count:91 0.0%
SCREEN_FROZEN (Android System): 2 s (2 s) Count:21 0.0%
Event Log Service (Google Services): 2 s (2 s) Count:246 0.0%
BBS_WAKELOCK_WHILE_SAVING_REF (com.asksven.betterbatterystats_xdaedition.BetterBatteryStats): 2 s (2 s) Count:6 0.0%
NetworkLocationCacheUpdater (com.google.android.apps.maps.Maps): 2 s (2 s) Count:182 0.0%
NetworkLocationLocator (Google Services): 1 s (1 s) Count:146 0.0%
sleep_broadcast (Android System): 1 s (1 s) Count:13 0.0%
GTALK_ASYNC_CONN_<redacted email address goes here>/android_talkde72a8447f49 (Google Services): 1 s (1 s) Count:371 0.0%
LocationReportingService (com.google.android.apps.maps.Maps): 1 s (1 s) Count:3554 0.0%
AudioOut_2 (1013): 1 s (1 s) Count:-2 0.0%
================
Kernel Wakelocks
================
"modem_usb_gpio_wake" (): 20 m 53 s (1253 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)1525/202/1525 3.8%
"PowerManagerService" (): 17 m 30 s (1050 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)1837/0/0 3.2%
"modem_usb_suspend_block" (): 16 m 20 s (980 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)1759/0/0 3.0%
"alarm_rtc" (): 12 m 20 s (740 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)1439/0/190 2.2%
"musb_autosuspend_wake_lock" (): 3 m (180 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)1347/583/0 0.5%
"alarm" (): 2 m 40 s (160 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)2044/538/0 0.5%
"max17040-battery" (): 11 s (11 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)550/0/0 0.0%
"twl6030 adc" (): 7 s (7 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)3575/0/0 0.0%
"nfc" (): 5 s (5 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)23/0/23 0.0%
"radio-interface" (): 2 s (2 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)19/0/0 0.0%
"vbus-tuna_otg" (): 1 s (1 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)5/0/5 0.0%
"KeyEvents" (): (0 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)6915/0/0 0.0%
"mmc0_detect" (): (0 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)1656/0/1 0.0%
"gpio_input" (): (0 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)36/5/0 0.0%
"secril_fmt-interface" (): (0 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)307/0/0 0.0%
"power-supply" (): (0 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)55/0/0 0.0%
"client-interface" (): (0 s) Cnt:(c/wc/ec)22/0/0 0.0%

(not meant to be sad faces... lol)

Maybe I need to uninstall updates for and disable google maps? Don't know what to do about the top processes under kernel wakelocks... betterbatterystats logcat attached too. Seems like there were some errors connecting to servers, and some weird alarm stuff in there... don't know what any of it means. I think at the time I had leankernel installed --- which actually gave me greater drain from phoneidle. Now I am back to stock after a factory reset. Will get another log tonight.
 

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  • logcat-2013-02-19_215105185.txt
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I didn't get a battery graph screenshot of that run... I disables google location services (& gps), and the battery drained much less, I ended up with 86% instead of 78% starting with 100%. Also I think google now was disabled. Now I have re-enable gps (but kept off other location services), and disabled avast wakelock while scanning. I will look into my alarm settings too... maybe disable the clock and see what happens.
 
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I'm now on JBSourcery 4.5.6, which is android 4.2.2-based, for about a week. THe sleeping battery drain on it was a little better, but nearly the same.

I disabled: Avast (BBS showed it doing some overnight stuff), Sourcery tools (BBS showed lots of overnight activity, plus if I want to edit my system with it, I'll just re-enable it for a bit), and turned off location services (except for GPS) (I think this is what is shown being most active in the BBS log above), and my battery life is back to normal (what it was on 4.0.4 -- e.g. about 1.3%-1.7% drain per hour in deep sleep).

I can't exactly remember my settings on 4.0.4 when I had what I considered normal battery drain. I went through my old screenshots, but couldn't find any that showed it... I think I just stopped taking screenshots of battery drain.

BetterBatteryStats rocks!

===

Update:

I'm b ack on stock 4.1.1 currently, and while battery life while sleeping isn't what it what on 4.0.4, I'm getting 1.8-2.2% battery drain per hour hour while sleeping, which is much better than 2.4-3+% drain per hour that I was getting before. Still not quite my target of less than 1.7% drain per hour. Things I did: disable all location services except gps. Google Now is off (cant remember if it was on when I first posted this thread), and stopped avast from waking the phone while scanning (I will try disabling avast completely next).

My BetterBatteryStats logs are showing some signal loss, not sure if that is lte or cdma, and not sure if it happened on 4.0.4, but that could be to blame. Hopefully 4.2.2 radios will be better.
 
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