My battery life is the same or possibly better with Diablo.

Those having trouble, suspect that a program or process is stuck in some loop and eating up processor power and preventing it from going into one of the power save modes.

There are several ways to test for this:

1) Install and observe the status-bar load applet

2) From an X-term shell, run "top" and observe the CPU% of the top few processes
("q" quits "top" other commands can be found on the internet, but note that
this is the stripped down "busybox" version of "top")

3) Install and observe "conky" (a discusion found in the "apps" section of ITT).
The problem with conky is that it uses a little processing power itself so will
drain the battery too, but only while you are running it.

Once the resource hogging process is found, come back with one of those postings that says "Program/Process xxx is hogging up 99% of my processor usage", and we can then work from there.

In the meanwhile, keep doing updates, and perhaps the problem will just go away. My Diablo upgrade was fairly problematic. At several times I had things crashing and locking up in loops until I got most of the 3rd party software installed in a stable working order. I still have a few things not working, but at least now the list is short.

Good advice but the screen size makes top almost unusable as the process name if practically off the screen.

The zoom +/- keys always work...

Indeed, makes it a whole lot better

On my tablet it seems modest is hogging the CPU at 96% constantly

This will catch processes that are running continuously and eating up CPU. It will not catch processes that come in periodically, eat up lots of CPU and go away. Whenever I have run top, I see CPU utilization around 3%-4% and no process seems to be hogging CPU, yet my battery dies in 3 days. How would one catch a transient periodic process?

Yeah it does something timer related and I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember or find a link to the bug/explanation. Can anyone remember what it was? I seem to remember it was possible to switch this behaviour off by setting/unsetting some envvar or similar :S

modest does not even work for me for google mail (maybe it will work when I am not behind a firewall). So that is one less battery hog for me

what i found myself doing after reading this thread was to shut down all of my desktop applets, except homecpuspeed. then i observe.

its will drop to about 164 mips. then rise again to 397 mips. then it may drop again to 164, and rise again. but sometimes it will basically lock at 397.

at the same time i have load-applet in the statusbar. when homecpuspeed locks at 397, i will see a load-applet pulse between 1 and 2 blocks. and this is just me sitting there looking at the desktop.

now, if i run something like say notes, load-applet will show a steady low cpu while notes is just sitting there doing nothing.

if i then close down notes, homecpuspeed will show 397 for a while, then 164, and then go back up to 397 and sit there, or pulse between 397 and 164. most likely it will just go to 397 and sit there...

something is eating away in there, but all i can find that is doing something is hildon-desktop...

Well, you're running two applets that graphically display stuff to watch load and CPU; I'd try disabling those and monitoring it with a script that loops, dumping data to a file (so as not even to incur CPU load for network traffic ala ssh) and see if it does settle. Keep in mind that the waking up to run the applets might occur before it samples the CPU... it could be 164 99% of the time. (Which of course applies to any method of measuring it...)