Android OS eating up a lot of battery?

[lbds137]

I'm having an issue with battery life - the "Battery use" section of the Settings app says that Android OS ate up 46% of my battery, which seems wildly high. It also says that it used 1h 30m 59s of CPU time, which also seems ridiculous. Does anyone know why this would happen?

For the record, my phone was mostly idle today, and while 10 hours of battery life so far (phone is at 15% currently) is not bad, I've seen better in the past with BB 0.5 (on idle I saw up to 24 hours). I really like CM, so I'd like to figure this out.

An additional piece of information that may or may not help: I have A LOT of apps installed on my phone (vast majority are on SD card). I have so many that the OS won't recognize any of my SD apps when it boots up unless I delete ~10 of the apps from /mnt/secure/asec and then reboot, at which point it will recognize all the remaining SD apps.

Thanks in advance for your help!

EDIT: After doing a Google search and reading a few forum threads, I found a suggestion to use Spare Parts for greater battery use granularity.

It turns out that tiwlan_wq used the CPU for 1h 30m 35s, which pretty much lines up with the high "Android OS" usage I mentioned before. Compare this with 10h 13m 16s total time spent on WiFi. Why would WiFi be using the CPU 1/10 of the time it was on? Is it because of constant connection / reconnection?

I'm thinking that it's either that or my kernel acting up with WiFi for some reason. The thing is, I've used this same kernel on BB 0.5 for months and didn't have this problem. Then again, I don't remember using WiFi that much, so maybe this is a latent issue that is just now coming up.

 

[bendystrawboy]

An additional piece of information that may or may not help: I have A LOT of apps installed on my phone (vast majority are on SD card). I have so many that the OS won't recognize any of my SD apps when it boots up unless I delete ~10 of the apps from /mnt/secure/asec and then reboot, at which point it will recognize all the remaining SD apps.

Thanks in advance for your help!

wow...i wonder what the problem is.

 

[lbds137]

An additional piece of information that may or may not help: I have A LOT of apps installed on my phone (vast majority are on SD card). I have so many that the OS won't recognize any of my SD apps when it boots up unless I delete ~10 of the apps from /mnt/secure/asec and then reboot, at which point it will recognize all the remaining SD apps.

Thanks in advance for your help!

wow...i wonder what the problem is.

I asked this question in the hopes of getting some help, not sarcasm.

I have had this many apps installed for months (and recently I even uninstalled a few), and this issue did not come up until very recently. Most of the apps I have are games, and I paid for most of them so I'd rather not uninstall them. Besides, since when is having a lot of apps INSTALLED something that should slow down a device? I don't have a lot of apps that RUN in the background, so it shouldn't be an issue. That's precisely why I'm puzzled about the high CPU usage by the Android OS.

However, now that I looked in SpareParts I think WiFi had something to do with it, so I'll try turning it off for the next 24 hours and see if things improve.

 

[DeathTokittens]

Similar usage

I have noticed similar usage on my device since moving from Sapphire1.1.4. I am getting like 4-6 hours with WiFi and 6-8 hours without.

Here a some screens from my usage the other day.

 

[bake3020]

You probably need to pick and choose what apps to uninstall so your
card won't be so bloated. You can always re-install later. Get rid of
you app killer & anti-virus, if you have them. If you don't have a
cach cleaner, you need to investigate a good one and run it often.
I hope that will help, my knowledge is limited but it should help some.
Good luck.

 

[BayouFlyFisher]

Considering that it only takes a few seconds to install an app from the Market, doesn't it make sense to uninstall apps that you only use once a month or less? If you do so, then you can just install them, use them and uninstall them. I do that with Google Goggles, Google Sky Map, etc.

Here's my battery life list:

Battery Life

Here's my tips (Individual items may not apply your phone):

1. Go to settings/wireless & networks/mobile networks/Enable always-on data. Uncheck always on data. Your phone will still receive email, text, & phone calls as before as well as internet usage but your battery will last a lot longer.

2. Emails: I don't know what email app you use, but try this. It saves battery power and in some cases emails arrive quicker. This scheme will have you using only the Gmail app on the phone for all email accounts whether they are pop3 accounts or Gmail. Go to the Google Gmail inbox on your computer and log into the Gmail account. On the top right of the screen is an option called Settings. In there is an option to have the Gmail program poll your regular, non-Gmail accounts (From the inbox; Settings/Accounts & Import/ Check mail using POP3). Provide the email address and the password. The Google Gmail program will then poll your other accounts on a frequency from 1-5 minutes and push the email immediately to your phone. The polling frequency is determined by each account's activity - more emails = faster polling. This saves battery power because on the android OS pop3 accounts are polled at a frequency of 1-30 minutes and that really eats battery. Because the phone goes and checks those accounts for mail whether there is mail there or not.

3. If you are using Live Wall Papers, stop!

4. Use wifi any time it is available. It uses a lot less power than 3G and it is much faster.

5. If there are widgets that automatically update (facebook, weather, etc.) change their update frequency in their settings menu. Set them to 30mins or 1 hour.

6. Oh, almost forgot, get the extended battery from Verizon.

7. Turn off the GPS unless you are actually using it. There are some background apps that can burn a lot of power via a live gps.

8. The Power Control Widget is a good tool for easily turning on and off some of these features (gps, wifi, screen brightness, etc.).

9. From the home screen do the following: menu/settings/About Phone/Battery Use. This graph will show the 10 biggest power users on the phone. It should always be Screen as the top user and the android os, android system, phone standby and phone idle should be the other top users. If there is an app listed you should determine if it’s an app you actually use a lot or do you have a rogue app that needs to be uninstalled.

10. Get Screebl. It will turn your phone off anytime you are not actively using it.

11. If you have either a task killer or an anti-virus app installed, you should uninstall.

12. Go to data>system>and delete batterystats.bin after you've charged your phone to 100%. This will help with battery meter accuracy.

13. D2G - go in to settings, wireless and networks, mobile network and change the network type from global to CDMA only. The d2g is locked out from using the local GSM networks in the US. You don't need global radio turned on in the US just overseas. Go into Settings > Wireless & Networks > Mobile Networks > Network Mode > and turn off the default setting of Global and turn on CDMA. This assumes you are in the US.

14. If you have ad blocker, turn it off.

15. If you are using Launcher Pro, try switching to ADW for a while.

 

[ukyfan]

12. Go to data>system>and delete batterystats.bin after you've charged your phone to 100%. This will help with battery meter accuracy.

15. If you are using Launcher Pro, try switching to ADW for a while.

Once you delete the file I am guessing that it gets recreated right?

And why do you say switch to ADW from LP?

 

[BayouFlyFisher]

12. Go to data>system>and delete batterystats.bin after you've charged your phone to 100%. This will help with battery meter accuracy.

15. If you are using Launcher Pro, try switching to ADW for a while.

Once you delete the file I am guessing that it gets recreated right?

And why do you say switch to ADW from LP?

It was reported by a few folks that they got much better battery life by switching from Launcher Pro to ADW. I tried it and I can confirm that on my phone I also got better battery life with ADW. However, on my phone while using one of the "in development" Gingerbread roms it was more "glitchy" too. I reasoned that if it is used on a stock phone or one running any one of the dozens of "final" roms, it would not exhibit that quirkiness.

BTW, it was also much faster than LP (on my phone).

Good luck.

 

[ukyfan]

Wish I would have seen this a few days ago. I just finally purchased LPP. I hate switching when I paid for something else.

I also use the DX live wp I picked up over at xda because I really like the look of it, but I have been thinking about stopping that as well. If I could find a normal wp that looks like it I would defiantly switch to it.

 

[mrmobileperformance]

Use QuickClock to downclock your phone a bit. That'll increase battery life. You can always switch back to a faster profile when battery lofe doesn't matter so much.

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