heh, killing hildon-desktop via load-applet makes homecpuspeed pulse between 164 and 397, until right before it plans to turn the screen of automatically. then it settles at 164 for maybe 10 seconds and then the screen dims.

as for using a script to dump to a file, kinda out of my league

still, some of the home*-series applets seems to be able to send the cpu into a spin. seems mostly related to homewifi and hometemp (those are the ones that i have observed the patter with). this will persist even after i unload them.

only thing that really seems to help is killing hildon-desktop...

hildon-desktop, of course, runs all your applets (which are .sos, more like libraries than stand-alone executables). So maybe it's not unloading them...
(I think I got the filename right; mix of memory and brief google. Check it first.)

well the offending applets are python based so im not really sure whats going on.

im guessing they start some kind of timer thats checking different sys files and similar at intervals, but beyond that i got no clue. could be that unloading them fails to stop said timer or something...

But I think, if you disable all applets, you should be able to get consistently low frequencies. (Maybe only after disabling them all and killing the desktop again...)

But in any case, with the above shell script, you should be able to log stuff to a file with minimal impact, anyway, and without a fixed set of applets; that way you can see if either the load-meter or the CPU-speed applet are being themselves major contributors...

hmm, homewifi leaves a tick, but thats not surprising. something each 25-30 second or so.

load-applet seems to also have one, but at longer intervals.

homecpu on the other hand seems to not have any...

i dont know whats going on, but i wonder if hildon-desktop have a issue with cleanly unloading applets at times. but that could be highly bothersome to track down...

anyways, thanks for the help.

I've also found it handy to lock the screen (thus then shutting down the screen) then run "top" from a remote computer vis ssh.

For the long term event logging, I wonder if it is possible to log any changes in power state and/or cpu frequency? This also assumes you run the logger at a very low prioity so the logger itself does not cause these events.

Yup. I too noticed horrible battery life after upgrading to diablo. Thinking of flashing back. But I'll try it for a few more days. I just changed a wifi setting. Hope it helps. Also I've not used modest nor set it up.

Just a comment towards GeneralAntilles. It is nice to see a list of things one could check, still i have a remark:
For me it looks like lots of people have problems with drained battery since the diablo upgrade, the same applies to me, even when all radios are off!
So i wouldn't check on the people's devices if something is screwed up, it is just to obvious that the issue is in the SW.

I will check if this modest is the one to break it, it is anyway for me useless as i want to use GMX IMAP mail and modest has a bug here.

------------ clip -------------------
Is your internal card corrupted?
Is your external card corrupted?
Is metalayer-crawler running away when the device should be idling?
Is Modest choking out on something and running away when the device should be idling?
Have you installed any nasty CPU-eating home applets?
Are there any applications that you leave up that might cause problems?
------------ clap -------------------

> it is just to obvious that the issue is in the SW.

Actually, I just upgraded to Diablo on my N800 and although I do not have much experience with OS2007 battery life, I believe I am getting very good battery life. Typically 10days, 6 hours (reported) on a full charge with WiFi turned off. In practice, I get about 3 days of use without power-down and maybe 90 minutes use per day with WiFi and max power saving. Seems about normal compared to posts I have seen here. Note that I had a pretty clean system before I did the upgrade. Basically no apps installed but the ones it came with (I just got it 'new').

It *does* look like the poor battery life is related to the upgrade on your system, but probably not OS2008 itself. Hence that list may be useful after all.

I was having the issue with poor battery life and I did upgrade to diablo recently. lardman pointed out xterm can keep dynticks from slowing down tick rate and I had gotten into a habit of leaving xterm running. I have now been shutting all apps down consistently when I am not using N800 and my battery life seems to be decent. I am getting about 5 days of use out of it with wifi usage for 30-45 minutes a day, media player for 1-2 hours a day and other apps like xterm, notes etc used for roughly half hour each day. This is good enough battery life for me and is in line with what I used to see earlier (before I got into the habit of leaving xterm running )