Methods for determining battery drainage / cause
 

Hello Maemo, I've done a few searches and haven't anything really all that comprehensive. Does anyone know of an existing list, which indicates which apps are known to drain battery life in ways outside of their function. (ie, programs continues to scan while closed, draining battery prematurely, etc.)

My N900 is having some real drain issues lately. I've been using a combination of turning the cell radio off, disabling wifi, and forcing deep sleep in an attempt to get more battery life, but I'm still loosing anywhere from 8-12% over the course of a few hours, while the phoen shouldn't be doing anything.

Thanks for any help.

Edit: I'll be editing this post with info I find that is useful to said subject. As I discover apps known to do this I'll put them below (I'll try to provide links to the source where I can):

- Personnel IP App (circumvented if phone is rebooted on a daily basis)
- All Daemons (apps ending with a d, this is not so serious, as their use is mostly very little, but can build up over time, especially with alot running at once) This includes batterygraph and eye.
-fmtx widget
- There is a know hildon bug associated with categorize and apmefo that has to do with reorganization items, and quickly moving between folder items that causes hildon.desktop to continue to run at about 1-5% cpu load. Rebooting or killing hildon.desktop with htop fixes the problem temporarily.
- MaeNotify appears to cause an excessive amount of drain as well.

Edit: Powertop is a useful program to investigate in depth power use. See page 3 for it's use and installation.

Edit: Tho shared a method he uses to track down battery drain issues. Seems very efficient and practical, here is a link to the comment:

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...4&postcount=52

2d

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

I can see a similar problem. Once I reloaded my phone – turn it on and do nothing, my battery drain looks great. But as soon I’ve been once in the INet (Wifi or 3G) or answered a phone call, the battery drain looks much worse than before – this is somehow strange… (running Titan v37 kernel).

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

It would be handy to get a list of apps that cause drain or people suspect to cause drain, would'nt mind trying to find a list of apps that take space on your rootfs as well, so we can try to encourage the developers to optify them, i only have 59mb left, and have no idea which apps are taking the room up.

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

a) 59 root is fine
b) if we had a list they would never make it past -testing
c) do you have extras-testing and -devel enabled?
d) you'll have to cook your own watch before. Get a monitoring app, get conky, get battery-eye and check to see what it does when it does it. Then you can be helped. Repos have some 5000 packages. More specific please?

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

To start to pinpoint this please provide information on which repositories you activated and a list of installed apps.
The list you get by this cmd in xterminal
to have them handy via Notes make it
now it is available under Documents in your filebrowser

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

I have the following repo's activated:

Both Nokia repos
ovi repo
maemo extras
maemo dev
mozilla

And below is the list of installed apps:

For the record I have already tried using battery graph to solve this. The problem is that battery graph doesn't tell you which process caused the battery usage to spike (that is perhaps too strong of a word, it's not going all out, it's just elevated). Running conky doesn't help anything either, as when the phone is active (screen on) the processes shuffle.

I will also add that my N900 has had the wifi bug since I've gotten it, and 1.2 has done nothing for that. (I have to reboot after using wi-fi or loose a ton of battery)

2d

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

The main battery drain I have seen is yesterday when I had a Fennec/Firefox process hang and take up 99% of the CPU. It ate most of my battery in under an hour. I had put it back on my belt and the next time I pulled it out, I noticed that the device was warm to the touch, and fired up conky to see if anything was eating the CPU. Sure enough, there was that stray Fennec process...While I prefer tabbed browsing instead of opening multiple disparate windows, I am going to be very circumspect about my use of Firefox for a bit, or I'll use iceweasel from Debian...

--vr

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

I see you have apmefo installed, so I assume your using custom folders for your menu?

If so, there is a bug in hildon-desktop that will cause it to run at 4-9% continuously after run access the app menu. See either apmefo or catagorize threads for more info. This can cause the batter to drain rather quickly.

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

For any curiou son more specifics relative to Lemmyslender's post, here is the bug tracker link for said battery drain:

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10412

2d

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

Sometimes microb is left hogging cpu for me

Sometimes wifi is left active doing nothing at all despite phone using edge for data..

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

By using conky i mean leave it running and see what process never shuts up or spikes repeatedly.

Also, is it me or did you say you have extras and extras-devel but not extras-testing? You are missing on stable verions.

camkeyd is deprecated. Also, you have shortcutd installed at the same time.

osso screen calibration fix is also deprecated in PR1.2

Finally, you seem to have several daemon based apps. Maybe the sum of those are a drain? How much media do you have? Images, audio, video? Tracker could be in trouble.

Also, I say qcpufreq. Did you mess with CPU speed? Lowering speed can give you increased consumption.

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

haha this is hilarious :D you have gazillion daemons running and you complain about battery drain...

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

Hey i have shortcutd installed.....does this by any means cause any battery drain?

and what about tweaker?i have it also installed...

Can u pls list the daemon based apps??so that i can uninstall and check the battery life

my battery also sucks

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

All apps that do something when not started drain. battery-eye, e.g. is one. As is battery-graph. To log battery, one needs to run. Also, shotcutd, camkeyd, etc are all daemons. All servers.

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

Glad this is providing some amusement. Just when I think I have Linux under wraps, I go and discover I'm clueless once again. I know this is blasphemy around here but after developing for windows system the past 10 years, I really prefer that OS.

Anyway, I've installed a bunch of things in preparation for installing the NITDriod build.

Edit: Is the pymaemo-optify app necessary anymore under pr1.2? Also forgot to mention normal extras as an active repo. I have it enabled.

Edit #2: Also there are a ton of things that I've uninstalled from the App manager that are still on that list. How would I go about removing them via x-term, as I imagine this is the only way to do it?

2d

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

A couple more follow on questions. Programs like batterygraph. If I kill the process via htop, will this be a good way to kill it's drain until the next restart? For example if I don't want it running but would still like to have the app installed? Could this method be extended to other daemons I don't necessarily need running as well?

My list needs some cleaning up, as a bunch of things have long since been uninstalled. (Openvpn, personnel-ip, etc.)

2d

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

i too have questions around battery drain. i flashed my 900 then installed about 50 apps. i soon started getting notifications that the device was consuming more power than it could be given via usb. i flashed again and have only added 15 or so apps that i had before and trusted to work good. I had just assumed the drain was from a app i downloaded, but now maybe i had the same high amount of daemons running. so how does one kow if the app being installed runs in the background? thanks.

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

But battery eye & battery graph doesnt record the battery activity when its idle right?

these two apps only use cpu when they are opened.it takes 5-8secs to load since it needs to get the details so that the graph/percentage left can be shown.

so i think they dont drain battery unless you use them

Pls correct me if i'm wrong

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

Where do you think the polled data concerning your battery usage is just coming from? Something has to be recording it. Open up top or htop and you'll see both of those activities in your processes list.

2d

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

come on, a bit common sense please. Install one app and see for couple days if it is draining battery.

or if you have installed million apps, remove one and see if situation gets better.

good rule of thumb: if you don't know what to do with app x, remove it. or have you really used ssh server for example?

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

An utility tool that would record the total CPU time and total network activity used by executables would be handy. Though it could be the one at the top regarding CPU time...

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

on an other hand it would use a lot less power compared to removing and installing random packages plus monitoring if battery consumption changes...

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

So I've been trying to clean up my packages list, and am not having any luck. As root I've tried the following commands:

apt-get purge, autoclean, clean

as well as apt-get purge with the specific package listed.

It just keeps saying the package is not installed and is therefore not removed.

So how do I clean up the packages list? Or is that just the way it works?

2d

Ps: I'm also certian that the bug mentioned earlier in this thread is the culprit for my increased battery drain. I've been monitoring hildon.desktop and it is spiking and almost always running at 1-4% cpu cycles.

After killing the process it returns to normal, however as soon as a menu item is accessed the activity returns. I really hope they come up with a fix for this bug, because it is killing my phones productivity.

2d

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

If you are adventurus you could install PowerTop. It will give you good information if you can understand it.

I uninstalled the fmtx widget as i saw it drew battery. Noticed a little change. And did my own fmtx widget with the help of QBW. ;)

1. sudo gainroot
2. apt-get install powertop

you will not find it in app manager and you run it from terminal.

1. sudo gainroot
2. Start PowerTop.. during the count down
3. Close all program and the keyboard
4. Lock the screen and wait a minute

If you want it to save to a file..
2. powertop > /path/to/the/file.txt

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

what repo is powertop from, dev?

Also I don't have the fmtx widget installed, but thanks for the tip.

2d

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

It's in extras-devel so you'll need to make sure it is activated.

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

i saw these 2 apps only once in my htop/top.
And both were not consuming any % of cpu.
so hw can it be possible if they were recording the usage?
but i also thought the same....it can only plot the graph or give us the detailed usage info if these info were prerecorded somewere....

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

Yep. Just becuase they were not using any CPU then, does not mean they don't. How long where you monitoring Htop? The entire day? But just so you know, it's not speculation or a theory, they do infact use battery juice. Just making sure that is clear.

2d

Re: Methods for determining battery drainage / cause
 

Over the past week or 2 I've also had battery problems. I ended up reflashing and thought it was all good and started installing apps. but the problem started again.

I can't help but think its the titan's kernel doing something OR conflicting with something cos ever since I uninstalled it 3 days ago, the mysterious battery drain disappeared.

I used powertop to see what's going on. It turns out that the kernel is doing something weird. The process:
<kernel core> with function tick_nohz_restart_sched_tick kept the phone in C0 state all the time. Battery drains to 0 in a few hrs. It's completely random and it takes a few restart for the problem to go away.

Anyone else have the same problem?

I'm gonna have another crack at reflashing and installing apps one by one and testing it slowly this time.

On a side note the scim package used for for chinese input also drains battery.

Once I start scim-panel-gtk, it keeps n900 from sleeping fully and keeps waking the n900 up. This can be confirmed by running powertop. n900 will spend approximately 30% of the time in C3 state and cannot go fully into C4 state.

The process cannot be killed, it just respawns. A restart is needed to unload it. If anyone can figure out a good way to stop it from respawning let me know!

Re: Methods for determining battery drainage / cause
 

hi guys, i've been viewing this forum for a few months now picking up useful tips and tricks on pimping my n900.
I'm just wondering if anyone knows of a list of apps and settings used by the power users to keep their n900's running nice and smooth?
if not would someone come up with 1 for the new guys like me... thanks

Re: Methods for determining battery drainage / cause
 

I have titans kernel and got about 90% on C4 and 1,5-2% on C0 so i am not sure it is the oc-kernel. Though i can confirm that tick_nohz_restart_sched_tick is one with the most wakeups.

Have never seen the scim-panel-gtk causing problems.. but that process must be pretty deep and if turned of cause instability.. thus it starts up again. Maybe if you remove it from init.d but that would probably cause even bigger problems.

Ohh.. and i forgot to say that powertop needs to be run with root or it segfaults.

Re: Methods for determining battery drainage / cause
 

It doesn't.
This is exactly backwards.

I'm trying to write a page explaining power use - this is not done yet.

http://wiki.maemo.org/N900_Software_Power_management
In a couple of days I hope to have it polished, including how to use tools.

Of an idle system.

PID# | Activity | Name | Function Entry (Expire)
--------+------------+----------------+---------------------------
0 | 15 | <kernel core> | tick_nohz_restart_sched_tick (tick_sched_timer)

This is only called when something happens, to reschedule when the next tick happens.
0 | 10 | <kernel core> | hrtimer_start (tick_sched_timer)
Similarly.

37 | 8D| awk | cpufreq_governor_dbs (delayed_work_timer_fn)
This is a kernel bug - the awk is bogus - as is the process number, this is really the CPU governor code being called - again after something else happens - to change the CPU speed.

From here on are 'real' wakeups.

743 | 7 | bme_RX-51 | sys_timer_settime (posix_timer_fn)
BME timer timing out 7 times in 30s.

475 | 3 | wl12xx | schedule_timeout (process_timeout)
wireless card timeouts.
1 | 3D| <kernel core> | queue_delayed_work (delayed_work_timer_fn)
I think this is to process delayed events.
475 | 2 | wl12xx | schedule_timeout (process_timeout)
475 | 2 | wl12xx | queue_delayed_work (delayed_work_timer_fn)
wireless card again.

Re: Methods for determining battery drainage / cause
 

SpeedEvil: Pleas explain about the i2c_omap too.

Re: Methods for determining battery drainage / cause
 

On the occasion that things behave nicely. I can get up to 97% on C4 on a complete idle system. As I have said previously, it was randomly keeping the device out of C4 and into C0. Will have another try on a completely flashed system on the weekend and see if what SpeedEvil describles will happen on a fresh system.

The scim-panel-gtk is not really that integral to the system. On a fresh boot it doesnt kick in. only when I click on the screen for the virtual keyboard the scim input box then pops up and the process stays. So I don't see why it can't be killed.

@SpeedEvil, can't wait for the full article

Re: Methods for determining battery drainage / cause
 

Nothing is random ;)

If i where you i would try to find out the reason before you flash. And i guess you will.. have you installed sysklogd? It might help you further in your investigation. Also the MicroSD card can be cause for some wake ups. I guess that is the "mmcqd" and "mmc1" processes.

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

The fact that a program is a daemon does not mean that it causes any battery drain. Take camkeyd, for example. All it does is sleep, waiting for a specific d-bus event. It does not run and therefore does not consume battery except for very short time when the camera key is pressed. Unless you spend all time pressing and releasing the camera key, it has absolutely no effect on battery life.

Shortcutd, on the other hand, might activate the proximity sensor which does draw non negligible amount of power, but it's CPU consumption is meaningless.

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

Good point. But still even as it sleeps isn't it still pulling power? An app not recieving any processing power will not be able to tell the event occured. At least not in any computer architecture I'm aware of. While the power I'm talking about to make this happen is negligible it is still power being drawn. I'm not sure how the operating memory of the N900 functions in comparison to desktop RAM, (I know how the my documents and sd card portion work) but I'm assuming even being loaded into this space still requires power to keep it there.

The only way an app can claim it doesn't use power, is when it's not being reported in your list of processes.

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

An app waiting for an event doesn't consume any processing power. If no apps and drivers have requested to be woken up in X amount of time, the CPU goes to sleep indefinitely. Some peripherals might remain powered, and some minimal amount of circuitry is powered to detect if you opened up the keyboard slide, pressed any buttons and so on. That then generates an IRQ that wakes up the processor. The kernel's driver and the kernel itself then checks what apps need to be notified of this event. Typically on the N900 most things end up going out through dbus, which sends a notification to the apps, which causes the kernel to schedule them for time on the processor.

Polling behaviour, an app doing something like checking if a condition exists, sleeping for a second or two, checking again, and so on, is very bad behaviour and not battery friendly.

Heck, even PCs are capable of this to some extent. Suspend to ram leaves the CPU powered off, RAM remains powered. The OS might elect to retain some hardware, to for example detect if user presses powerbutton or types on the keyboard.. It can program itself to be woken up by the RTC, and the RTC is capable of running years on the single lithium coin battery on the motherboard... It can even switch the entire system off. Of course, on a PC entering and leaving such low power modes takes ages and aren't a practical thing to do behind the user's back.. Exception here being OLPC where they threw out the BIOS and managed to program the computer to suspend while leaving the screen on, and managed to make it fast enough that it 's transparent to the user..

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

Both of the battery logging apps mentioned come with a background process that is "on" whenever the phone is. They do listen for changes in the values they record, and when they do, they write the observations to disk. This functionality will inevitably use some power.

However, data collection processes for both apps are pretty well behaved in that they will only do something when things change i.e. they do not poll (I think though that BatteryGraph has to do some very infrequent polling, maybe 10min interval, in order to record system load). I've been running both of these apps for about 5 months now, and dare to claim that neither of them should be causing measureable idle drain.

That said, if one doesn't want or need battery stats recording, there's no reason to keep these apps installed.

Re: List of Apps known to drain battery?
 

so what u are saying is that these apps dont drain much battery...but they do upto some extend....

if so how much % does it use?
how much battery life do you get?
can u give a brief analysis??

i enabled VDD1 by editing "pmconfig" file...but now am getting less battery life than before.....sometimes less than 10hrs with slight usage:eek: