Possibly Facebook Widget caused high CPU load and power drain
 

After Palm-OS and Windows-Mobile (trying several extension for full flash support) the N900 satisfied my web-browsing demands most of all devices I ever had. A really genious device. That was before the latest os-update so far. Since then it got completely unusable. Locking itself, slowing down, nearly not bootable and eating a full loaded battery within 1 - 2 hours.

I had installed facebook-widget, newsreader-widget, sms/mail-widget, foreca-weather-widghet, last-fm app, calendar widget, wify-switcher, 3g-switcher.

After the latest os update (about one week or so ago) the device gets unstable on every day. no chance to get calls from anyone in that state.

sometimes wifi-switcher does not show switching messages when i use ist. once i got for a second a message like messaging applikation hat to close (sms?).

I cant figure out how to debug that device and when i read throug other discussions i get shocked by a huge amount of similar, but not really the same problems - to be honest, if i had read throug these discussion before i bought the device, i would not have bought it.

hey, i need something for using, not for developing and debugging.

yours, really frustrated, christian from switzerland.:(

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

How did you update, and could you be a bit more specific about the instability you're suffering? Does your N900 reboot? Do applications crash? If so, which ones? What applications, widgets, themes, etc. do you have installed? What applications, widgets, etc. do you keep running all, or most of, the time? Do you have a MicroSD card in your N900? If so, what's stored on it?

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

This has been addressed in several other threads, but lets go over it again.

If your device is unstable the first course of action is always to remove all extras-devel apps and slowly add them back in one by one until you find the one causing the issue.

Yes it's a pain, Yes it takes time, but thats the price you pay for using devel level software.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Eating a full battery within 1-2 hours... that's highly unusual.

May I ask what usage your device is put through during that time?

Also, widgets usually eat away at battery life and combined with constant web browsing, can shorten it drastically.

I'm not an expert within this area, so I'll leave that for the more experienced that may (hopefully) pass by later today, but I'm sure it's not a problem that can't be fixed.

I'm currently on a N900 as well, and my battery life, even with 3G running is generally a little less than a day with moderate web browsing and calling/texting. With no or little internet connection but moderate calling/texting, I get up to two days.

Best of luck to you though Christian, and make sure you keep checking back!

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

something to consider is all the success people have had that they do not post. more people are successful with the device than have major issues.

that aside try completely reflashing the device. eMMC included. then i recommend adding your programs back a few at a time to see if your issue returns. this way you may be able to isolate the problem if it comes back.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Speaking of widgets that eat battery life. FMtransmitter and personal countdown can be major hogs. FMtransmitter seems to poll the state of the device to see if fm is on and update the icon. It does this often and I have gotten much better life after removing it.
Personal countdown - its important to change the update period so something realistic.

I can also agree with the emmc flashing option. Originally for 1.2 I didnt flash everything - just the fiasco - had major issues. Since flashing emmc as well as fiasco - much improved.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Ok, thank you. I got really impressed by the number and speed of answers within this short time. - Getting new hope. I always was impressed by the quality of maemo.org.

More Details concerning the problem:

* Updated over Wifi directly on the Device. Update description did say that existing widgets (like facebook) are updated too. Maybe there was a problem (reboot) during update can't remember.
* no devlevel apps installed at all (and do not plan to do so)
* when device get's unstable, there are no running apps execept for facebook-widget, rss-news-widget (update set to manually), foreca-weather-widget (update set to manually), wifi-switcher and g3-switcher
* when device get's unstable, mobile-phone is on, wlan is off, mobile-data-connections are off. no applications except the above listed widgets are running.
* symtoms: screen-unlock-switch on the right side of the device does not react. switch on top of the device does not react. maybe does react some minues later (like heavy cpu-usage). not visible if device is on or off. sometimes device does respond but every operation is extremely slow (even swiping from one destkop to another or pressing trying to anything. not visible what process is running (is there an application to show that? is there an event or error log?). sometimes shutdown does work, sometimes it acts like it was off and starts up. sometimes the screen gets iluminated but shows black. after reboot system reacts normal. When in use reacts normal. when left in standby after half an our or so gets the more and more unstable until not beeing usable anymore. hight battery drain, no application running. all wireless (except mobile phone) off.
*8GB SD Card installed, contains windows-mobile applications and n900 digital images, ebooks (fbreader)
*Applications: Forgot to mention, fbreader, fmtransmitter and fmbooster (both set to off), also irremote (camera-remote-control)

@Bratag: no devlevel installed, but will try to do (uninstall all and reinstall one by one) so with all my regular apps. This was a well running system before the os-update? Do i have to plan to do this on regular base?

@itsandrew: like stated above, no usage at all, no apps except widgets running. no wlan and no mobile-data-connection.

@kd-alex: yes, this is true. i got new hope with all the reply's. more bad that good things are posted. but reflashing every week or so when using only regular apps, is new for me. Did never hat do to that with my previous devices.

@sjgadsby: completed the description above.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

When it starts to be jerky/slow start x terminal and run command top and monitor processes that are on top. Is something taking over 10% cpu constantly?

.edit
And about apps. Please bear in mind following:
Maemo.org repository apps are not QA by Nokia (even thought it seems that Nokia is actually providing even worse QA on some of their ovi store apps) But ANYTHING you install to it is after all on your responsibility. YES community says that extra is safe and extra-testing/devel are for people who like to flash and report about problems, but still this is open. e.g. if you install app to windows and update win with sp3 and app brakes and affects windows performance it´s a bit 3rd part responsibility and on the other hand windows maintainers responsibility. So try to understand that freedom here means that actually quality(bugs regarding memory issues and performance issues) of apps might be weaker than on e.g. apple store where they probably test software quite troughtfully and have closed environment for apps to run.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

I will do so. Up to now, system running normal. Is this normal: mem used 237xxx k free 8xxx k?

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Applications installed:
3G/2G/Dual Mode Selection Applet
Amazon Installer (unsed)
AP News Installer (unused)
Documents To Go Installer
Documents To Go Viewer Edition (Licenced) - hey it works together with facebook docs :)
Facebook Destop Widget
Facebook Installer
Facebook Sharing Plugin
Facebook Widget and Photo Uploader
fbreader
feedservice-pluginfb-common (do i have to uninstall librarys myself or is there an uninstall routine for facebook?)
feedservice2
fm-boost
Foreca Installer
ForecaWeather widget
Maemo 5 (latest version)
shutter
Simple FMTX destkop widget
tutorial-home-applet
Vagalume
Wife Switcher
Yellow Notes applet

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Yes it is. Do not be afraid of it. Let´s try to find what is causing this.

I must warn that in the end it might be easier to just flash vanilla+emmc so that you get your phone to factory default.

.edit
Oh dear
How convenient :)

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

if I were you, I would do a complete (incl. eMMC) reflash using flasher 3.5.
after that adding one program after the other as suggested.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Thank you slender. i've been in application development myself for about 20 years and changed my profession to social work 7 years ago (got more insterested in people than machines)
I think, that there are some maemo-apps which i like much more than any iphone app will ever be. and yes i will keep in mind, that this is a group of developers and getting a n900 means to be fascinated by this group of people which keep maemo living too.

on previous devices i got task-list's to track errors. with your x-terminal command, i'll be able to look at my task's concerning memory consumption and processor usage, too.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Oh no. what a typo. I have to get out all of my school-english, while my daughter keeps on playing nintendo wii behind of me.

well if it really is easier to to the reflash i will have to read about it in another tread. did not understand emmc so far, but will find it. you know, i got my device for a few weeks and did not find out what the backup-app covers and what not. If i lose my sip-call-settings and my vagalume-settings and my calendar-items as well, i will spend some more hours later on that.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

I had many of the same issues. I did a back up, then flashed the latest firmware and emmc and the N900 is the daddy again. IMHO it far quicker than faffing about trying to find the culprit programme, especially when it may be the device itself.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Easy.. reflash from your PC

OTA updates are really buggy

As soon as you reflash your N900 will be better than a new one :P

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Sorry I said vanilla and emmc i meant that If you end up flashing vanilla(emmc, the internal memory where or settings and user data is) and fiasco(rootfs, OS itself)
http://wiki.maemo.org/Updating_the_tablet_firmware
Remember to take backup to external memory card or to your desktop pc. You can restore calendar and contacts but i would recommend not to restore apps because it might be problem with some program right now.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Thank you bockersjv, bachagabriel and slender.

I will do so, after reading through the flashing-and-backup threads.

I come to the conclusion, that i have to learn how to backup. before every new install i will do a complete backup, just in case, that the latest install hurts my system, so i can easily goback. I will let you know about it.

that explains that i'm the only one with that problem (searching the discussion-threads), because these problems don't seem to be analysed, people reflash their systems.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

another friendly reminder, PLEASE BACKUP YOUR FILE AND TRANSFER TO OTHER EXTERNAL SOURCE (eg. thumbdrive, hardisk etc.) when you are flashing your EMMC (vanilla)

most people forgot to transfer it,and there goes your contact lists.. :D

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Hi, skccs32, I am also shocked to know your battery problems. One thing many people might have missed is the battery drains caused by instability of 3G/GSM mobile network switching.

My mobile plan allows my phone to switch between 3G/GSM AND other mobile carriers. It means to improve the availability of network, but I found that if I am located in the particuler area where two networks overlapped, the battery drains very quickly.

The cost of network swithing seems to be very high, so I fixed the mobile carrier in the setting, and the battery no longer drains as before.

Anyway, YMMV. Hope this help and may Lord blesses you, your daughter and your N900 :)

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

i suggest, and this is in my experience, if you can, try to avoid updating via OTA or NSU, (re-flash your phone on the FW instead).

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Found out more details during night:

so its not the operating system hanging. just a few apps seem to use so much cpu, that all the system is slowing down. I left the device charging and turned on during night, with x-terminal top activated.

when trying to activate with the slider on the right, it took several seconds to activate. when trying to activate with the to buton there is the risk to stay to long on it and shutting down the device.

top shows the following (cpu > 3; memory):

user/bin/facebook 7.1 - 12.4; 1.1
user/bin/dbus-daemo 8.3; 3.9
user/bin/feedservice 7; 2.1
(mmicqd) 4; 0.0

system reacting so slow, that messages like "hildon-home does not react anymore, do you want to close it" come up. Uninstall could not be started.

After reboot i uninstalled all of the facebook apps, some could not be uninstalled but were uninstalled from other uninstalls:

Facebook Desktop Widget 0,5.3
Facebook Installer 1.0.-4.1.11+OU.5
Facebook Sharing Plugin 0.5.1 (including 2 Services?)
Facebook Widget and Photo Uploader 0,5.3

Since then the system is running stable for about 2 hours now. But i will try to reinstall later.

Anyway, i will learn how to do reflash and how to backup correctly (i heard the build in backup-solution is only for a few data like pim).

@one1002: Thank you, i will have to read though a thread describing how to backup to external media.

@gabby131: I will reflash, after having learned about it. I suppose my ota-update hat some other problems too (thank you for that hint) and i wand everything to be corrected. hope there are german images available.

@9000: Thank you, i found that mobile-phone-carriers (currently 3) in our country do have different quality concerning theyr services. I did stay with a more expensive carrier which is knows for good support and quality. I also realized with my previous (htc-branded) device, that the carrier usually has to define settings for every supported phone (mine was imported and not supported). as for the n900: it is offered by my carrier and therefore i suppose it is supported too. while discussing with the support they told me that the network-technology is all from ericsson. so there might be minor differences too concerning that. I'm able to switch from 3g to gsm and back using the switching-widget and i always disconnect the mobile-data-connection when i don't use it. this seems to work good. - hey, the lord bless you and your family (and your n900;-) too.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Hi Andrew, I am starting to suspect that one thing that perhaps could be a huge battery eater is the 3g connection. I'm not sure if this is related to PR1.2 at all (probably not), but at my workplace I notice that the 3g signal is kind of weak and battery drain goes quick during working hours but slows down to a minimum when I'm elsewhere, so I suspect that the device increase the signal strength and of course eat more battery. The question is whether the radio module/software has some glitches or is in the need for optimization. Maybe I need some more info about other phones and with the same mobile network in the area to see if the N900 stands out with the signal strength.

1-2 hours though sound a little bit too much to me. I get like 7-8 hours to reach like 15-20% of battery left at the office place (but that's a little bit high too if you ask me).

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Well in my case, it seems to have been due to cpu-consuming faulty applications running all the time. Today I did not have any problem anymore (uninstalled the suspicous widget). Got to say that without that problem my device gets a remaining about 90 % of charge after a work-day (all wireless lan and wireless mobile data off), just beeing in standby. But in the evening and with heavy using wlan, it goes down rather quickly ;-)

I will now try to reinstall the widget anew and reflash if the same error will occur until tomorrow.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

I used to have the same problems - the battery died quickly, phone was slow and was getting slower over time to the point it needed reboots to work. I have found that turning off wifi with the Wifi Switcher is the reason of this weird behaviour (everything worked ok before PR1.2). Try turning off automatic connecting to known wifi APs to save the battery instead.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

I recently did an OTA update to PR1.2 and got similar battery problems (dead in 2-3 hours). In my case, Conky showed me that the CPU clock-rate never goes below 500MHz (even when only at 5%-10% CPU load). I don't have the overclocking kernel installed, so that is not the root of the problem. But, as others have suggested, the easiest way to solve a problem like this is simply to reflash:

1) Run the backup-app and do an internal backup in N900
2) Plug your N900 into a computer and copy all files to your PC (the reflash will delete EVERYTHING, including photos, music, etc)
3) Reflash everything, both standard flash and eMMC flash. Howto at:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Updating_the_tablet_firmware
4) Copy all your files back to your N900 (make sure you place the backup directory where it was before)
5) Run the backup-app again to restore everything.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

I'm not sure if it's been changed in PR 1.2 but if you've set the phone mode to dual, it'll eat more battery as it constantly searches for 3G. I could be wrong though, my memory is a bit hazy.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

I noticed that the icon on the fm transmitter with the new 1.2 update was changing colors everytime I exited an app, or went to switch apps and went home screen, has anyone else noticed this drain?

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

I would recommend to NOT restore applications. Install one by one and see if some widget etc. gives you trouble.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Thank you, this Process-Description helps a lot

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

ok, did not know, that applications are covered by the backup, thought only data.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

I noticed the same. On the beginning of this thread somebody was telling about power-consumation of the transmitter. as so far i think it is a graphical issue. don't think it is transmitting, when switched off.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Thank you, i always have the switcher set to gsm. I only switch to dual or 3g when i check emails or want to browse the web. but i also do connect manually to the mobile-data-services of my phone-provider.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Actually it´s application list. It install same applications again, but still most important point in trying to find problem is to minimize the variables.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week - solved?
 

Well last night i reinstalled the facebook widget (including photo uploading funktion) and noticed that comments (ovi website) were telling that as of the latest os version some users hat problems to use this app.

This morning the systems was slow again and the top 3processes (same as posted before) were using 28, 28, 15 of cpu - additional the desktop used another 15. So the hole system was nearly at 100 % cpu.

Therefore I think I isolated the problem as the facebook app. If only I have this issue (I will search the threads about this app) it might be a problem with something going wrong with my latest ota os-update and facebook-app related interfaces.

I will leave out the facebook app and do a reflash of my device within the following days to have everything clean and proper again.

Hey, thank's a lot. This is a nice platform and website. I think i will be able to deal with future problems - with the help of all of the members ;-)

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

Wow! I thought I was the only Swiss person who owned a N900 :D just recently at while taking the train home, I saw a person surfing maemo.org or some such on his Nokia N900 :D I was quite happy to see, that I was not alone :D

Anyways, I personally wouldn't use any of the real-time-online widgets like for example the facebook app. It really does drain the battery pretty fast.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

well now as the device works again normally, i got to say its so much of delight to be able to have such a small device beeing able to render webpages just as they are. i'm just getting aware, how much energy i spent to get flash running on my previous devices - all invain.

can't understand that not more people realize what this device.is capable to do.

hey, the facebool widget is not what i miss, but the foto-uploader with its fast compression, i miss a lot.

greetings from basel

ps: just in case that you use bluewin email: did you find a solution for the locked pop account?

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

i apreciate your professional help.

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

@OP:
The global images are multilanguage and include german.

ps: please try to change the thread title to something more positive now ;)

Re: N900 - from love to hate in 1 week
 

i tried to edit the title of the initial post, hope this will do. thank you for the answer concerning german image and your proposal concerning the thread title.