Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Hi all, first thing first - I tried searching the forum for someone with a similar problem as I'm having, but found no one (at least, no one that used to have good battery life and suddenly doesn't).
As for my problem - for 10 days I'm experiencing a very odd situation that I can only describe as an extreme battery drainage - I used to have a very good battery life (before and after updating to PR 1.3) while lately my battery won't last for more than 7 or 8 hours, even without any use of the device...
I have some screenshots taken by the excellent BatteryGraph application, which shows this dire situation I'm having - this is showing the situation as it was about 12 days ago (9th Nov):

http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/4135/goodc.png

And this is how it looks these days:

http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/9950/badih.png

As you can see, this is an extremely disproportional behavior of the battery. This is the same battery as I had used before, I did not install anything really new since then, did not change and/or meddled with settings, and did not use my device in any different way than I used to.

• I have two batteries and they both "behave" the same (e.g drain REALLY fast).
• I tried charging both of the batteries with an external charger, but still they drain fast while being used.
• I tried reflashing my device (not eMMC though, only firmware) but it didn't help.
• WiFi/BT are of course turned off (and even if they didn't - this does not explain why without changing the way I use my N900 I used to have a battery which could last for more than a day, and now for no more than 8 hours).

If anyone can come up with a good solution for this, I'd really appreciate the help (else, I'd probably try to reflash my device including the eMMC) :)

P.S - I used to have another battery problem, though now its kinda solved by itself so I don't think its relevant, though it is worth mentioning in this context...

Thanks for the help in advance...

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Same problem here after firmware update ,( using 2 bat ) only 1 difference is that it not always drains fast as ur N900 , and aslo not found solution yet , will leave a msg if i have found solution for this bug ;)

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

There's probably something eating your CPU. Run 'top' or 'htop'. Install if needed.

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...0&postcount=55

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=59611

.edit
To install powertop IIRC:
-Enable devel repository (normal warnings apply)
- With root:
apt-get update
apt-get install powertop
apt-get clean
- Disable devel repository.
- Run powertop

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Afair violett is CPU.

There seems to be constant CPU usage with peaks around 4:00
and at 6:00.
What does "top" in this case say?

On desktop :
top -b -i > output.file
works but on N900
it only works with
top -b > outputfile
and produces a bit too much output.

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Thanks slender, but I knew I forgot something - I already tried using powertop and htop, but still could not find the cause for this problem.
Besides, as you can see from the screenshots, the problem is unlikely because of something which uses CPU, as in the screenshot where everything was fine (the first one) you could see a high CPU usage but still with a very low impact on battery drainage (I'd lose around 10% battery each 4 hours), while in the second screenshot you can clearly see that even with a relatively unexisting CPU usage, the battery would drain in a rate of 10%-12% an hour...
Though if you could still figure stuff better than me from the powertop application's output, I would post the results here. Just say the word :)

I have no idea what it was doing around 4:00 as I was probably asleep :)
Maybe its spying on me while I'm unaware of that? :eek:

Anyways, as I wrote to slender - those CPU 'peaks' (and you're right, the violet is CPU) should still not drain the battery that much...

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

With powertop you see also processes that wake up cpu in idle state. It's not all about cpu percentage but how often cpu is awaken also one of biggest battery drainers for me was wlan driver in first firmwares, but it has been since fixed.

And IMO your idle state cpu usage is huge in comparison to mine (almost none, read wiki and threads about "normal" cpu usage when you are running on bare minimum load/settings/apps). On the other hand I do not use any online activity apps when idle.

.edit
The best way to start looking for answers is IMO always to turn off everything and start starting stuff gradually and see how it effects to whole system. And if bare minimum state is still draining then it might be time to flash emmc+rootfs and not restore same apps that were before.

..edit
IIRC Powertop shows also some IRQ activity stats.

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

You said that you haven installed anything new but have you UPDATED anything.

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

I thought the same thing. What conserves battery is your processor being in idle. It rarely goes idle in your graph. Do you know which process is producing this constant usage ?

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Hmmm not sure I updated anything significant besides maybe the power-kernels (which I uninstalled [correctly] after witnessing the drainage).
Anyways - this is what powertop says:

If you can gather anything significant out of it (besides the basic stuff I gathered from the explanation provided in powertop's wiki page) - then be my guest :)

Nope, have no idea... Well, I think I got it once while taking a look at top, but I'm not sure it was it: /usr/bin/hildon-status-menu and /usr/bin/hildon-desktop

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

I´m going to sleep next so sorry for my rather rude output.

From where did you install power kernel? Do you have devel repository enabled?

Looking your powertop output with my ear it screams that something is fck up if it really represent your idle state. btw. it´s always good to run it couple of times to see that you get some pretty constant values.

So to ask obvious questions:
-Did you first remove all widgets from desktops
-Closed all apps
-went offline
-No daemons running (I have batterygraph and it seems to effect very little)
-Acted with powertop as I recommended in my link

(Probably shutting down, removing battery for 10 mins, rebooting and letting it calm down for 5-x minutes, depending on how long tracker runs AND then running powertop couple of times to get idle state value is good way to start debug)

I tried powertop and my statistics are currently following
Total wakeups 531 = IRQ 415 & Timers 116 and CPU is most of time (90%) in sleep C4 and rest of time in C3 and only fraction in couple of others and none in C0
Only additional thing I have running is batterygraph daemon. I have not installed any apps that install tweaked kernel so PR 1.3 official kernel.

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Check here: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=54462
It solved this problem for me back on PR1.2

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

I tried uninstalling Catorise, and reinstalling hildon-desktop - both did not help...

You are forgiven, son ;)

Well, as I mentioned - that powertool dump has probably caught the moment when my CPU raised and started sipping on my battery. Here's another dump with a more 'subtle' behavior:

I of course tried removing all my widgets (all I had was the SMS conversation, Dataplan monitor, calendar and music player - all of them were widgets which I ALWAYS used, even prior to the problem specified in this thread) but it did not help...
The power kernels which I was using were of course downloaded from the extra-devel repo...

Anyways, thank you guys for trying to help - and if anyone couldn't find the cause for this, I'd probably just reflash and this time will reflash the eMMC as well (though I'm not quite sure if it'd help at all)...

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Hmm. As you can see the cpu is pretty much idle but there is huge amount activity in IRQ.

Maybe it´s time to list your programs:
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=783088&postcount=2

Check what kernel you have
uname -r
command should give you 2.6.28-omap1

.edit
do you have memory card plugged in?

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Yeah, according to those powertops.. something is not right. Could start up Top and paste the log here?

1. top
2. press "m" to put the most memory hog at top
3. copy/paste here
4. press "p" for processes
5. copy/paste here

And a dmesg would be nice too...

1. dmesg > /home/user/MyDocs/dmesg-log.txt
2. attach it here...

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Here ya go (as you can see, my app list is not very long - I install only apps I actually use):
Yup, got 2.6.28-omap1...

Ah, I already thought about that direction - I removed it but it didn't help :o

Well since copy-pasting top from terminal was kinda tricky (kept refreshing the screen and de-selecting the text) I just took a screenshot, which I hope will suffice.
This one is the one with the sort processes by memory usage:

http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/7...0112315363.png

And this one is sorted by process usage:

http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/3...0112315174.png

Attached.

Thanks for the help so far, AlMehdi and slender :)

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Sorry.. forgot to mention "q" for quitting Top. Anyway... could not see anything directly wrong. Only that simple-fmtx-widget are a little famous as a battery drainer. So you might wanna try to uninstall that and use QBW instead.

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

I had a similar issue and the problem was Catorize and later flip clock.
Catorize was a real nightmare for battery

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Will try that, I have nothing to lose :)

Well I uninstalled Catorise but it didn't help... Needless to say, Cathorise was definitely not the problem (though I did remove it just to make sure) as I had it installed for a long time by now, and it worked ok and my battery was functioning well too...

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Hi,

I don't know if it is this but it seems your
/usr/sbin/browserd -s xxxx -n RTComMessagingServer
is running a little too high in memory and CPU.

Quick search, I see here other people having the same problem and quick battery depletion. e.g.:http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=61006

Other thing to try is also to remove programs one by one and see when/if this solves it.

good luck.

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

This bug was solved if i remember it correct..

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

I think it is pretty normal for it to be around 10 mb..

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Yes, you're right. Checked it again and mine's also 10ish.

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Kill a tracker - from your screens it seems it runs. It is a first suspect because it can easily eat the battery in 3-4h:

tracker-processes -t

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

AlMehdi - Removing simple-fmtx-widget did not help... :o

egoshin - Tried that now, will report later on the outcome. Thanks for the tip :)

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Nope, it didn't help :o


Any other propositions guys? I'm willing to try everything before I reflash the device...

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

I reflashed my phone the other day (camera stopped working after kernal update on Friday - then the whole system went down). since the reflash my battery lasts for less than 6 hours in standby.

What is going on????

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

I think a lot of things happened since you last reflash. You may show us the output of the following command for our further investigation:

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

thanks 9000
just ran command, how do I copy report from Xterm?

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

This was just answered here by slender a few posts ago... why didn't you look? :confused:

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Reflashed my device entirely (both firmware and emmc) but it didn't help :(
Also tried removing some applications but it didn't help either... Damn strange... I don't think its a CPU thing, as sometimes - in BatteryGraph - I can see that the battery drainage is steady even though there's almost no CPU activity at all.

I wanted to try something I saw egoshin suggested in another thread:

But I keep getting errors which says that "cat /syspart/applications/standby/background/tasks" and "ps | grep modest | cut -c1-5" are invalid arguments... Any ideas anyone? I'm practically willing to try anything, I have nothing to lose :)

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

You didn't mention, did you restore your settings from a backup afterwards?

Many had understood in the past that the restore was bringing back the same problem since the problem was in some setting or corrupted file making the whole reflash moot.

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Yea I did restore my settings and I thought this might be what hinders my phone's battery function again, I'll have to check it too - but not now because I need my phone with all the current settings :)

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

The high CPU activity seems to come every hour. It could be email trying to sync if you set it to 1h automatic sync.

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

And did you restore ANYTHING from backup before testing phone?

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Yea I restored everything back, I was hoping the flashing alone would fix the problem - next step would be flashing (I think this time flashing only the firmware would be enough) and testing without restoring settings...

I'm not using emails on my phone :o

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Well it didn't help :(
I flashed my firmware, did not restore a single thing (though most of it is already there, such as contacts and music, because I didn't flash the eMMC), installed only BatteryGraph, but the battery still drains very fast as usual...

I wonder - could the problem be with BatteryGraph? :confused:
Anyways, I'll try to reflash again, this time including the eMMC...

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Bah... flashing the eMMC as well didn't help too... I didn't restore any setting this time, just flashed the firmware and eMMC and installed BatteryGraph to monitor the battery performance, but still it drains fast.

I thought this might be related to BatteryGraph so I uninstalled it, and installed BatteryEye instead - but still it drains fast.
The problem must be related to my batteries (even though its kinda odd both of my batteries are affected by this at the same time), or in my phone itself (which is more likely, though I have no idea what can cause this)... :(

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

Have you tried to use them empty. Sometimes battery meter goes nuts and tells that battery is empty and I'm able to use battery for hours after warning.

Also. I would like to say that see how simple and easy things are when you (first) start from zero level :) Now we know that problem is not the apps/settings you have installed but maybe some HW(battery or N900) or BME bug you have found.

Re: Help me find the cause for an extreme battery drainage :)
 

As far as I can remember it happened once, and the phone turned itself off, so IT IS empty :)

Yea, but starting from scratch means (temporary) loosing all your files and settings, and its pretty annoying to get everything back the way it was... :)

I have a strong feeling that this is the issue, though I have no idea of how to confirm such a thing...

I'm not the first to find it for sure, but I hope it is it because that means this could be fixed rather quickly.

Anyhows, I want to thank anyone who tried to help me so far (and especially you slender ;)), even though the problem still not fixed - your help did not go unnoticed :)

I was thinking, maybe the problem is with the battery? Maybe it "thinks" its full when its fully charged, but in fact it isn't? I think I recall there was a way to "reset" the battery's memory (it has some kind of a built-in chip for this purpose, no?), so maybe I could try reseting it and everything will come back to normal?