Update 2....

Last night left my N800 in SoftPowerOff with OMWeather as the only Applet enabled...

This morning DOA / OFF. Had to plug 'er in to boot up.

I will try same again Sunday night. Tonight I'll leave one of the other applets running.

Later

what refresh schedule are you using? i am using 8 hours and manually refreshing if i need anything sooner... do you have autolock installed?

Auto update for OMweather was set at every 8hrs. I've changed it to never, and see what it does tonight.

I don't have autolock? That is specific to the N810, right? I have an N800.

Update this morning: N800 with 8days idle 6hrs in use.

I'll keep checking the other applets over night....but it looks like my culprit was OMWeather 02.1 trying to refresh....

Later

Ok. here's some data and a graph which shows the problem here:

My setup ist pretty standard,

Diablo w/update
8GB external sd-card, formatted w vfat and ext3
statusbar w/ LoadApplet, AdvancedBacklight
No Applets at all on the home screen

Applications running during this test:
emacs
battery-status -d2 in xterm
all automatic checks for email etc. are off.

I started after reboot, logged in via ssh/WLAN and scp'd the battery data from yesterday's test (battery drained during the night). After that I disconnected from WLAN. There were occasional checks of the battery status via emacs. The ps output is attached. Please note that modest is already up and running although I did start from a reboot. As far as I figured out this is because of connectiong to WLAN.

After 400 mins I started modest and went to check my email (imap and pop3). 5 min later I switched off modest and WLAN and left the N810 sitting on the bench. There were occasional checks of the battery status via emacs.

I guess the graph speaks for itself the slope of the remaining battery is significantly steeper after calling modest.

So far all of my tests showed that I can do almost anything w/o problems. Just when I run modest to check my emails (and maybe close it afterwards) there's significatly higher power consumption.

And, secondly, this problem has not been present before the feature upgrade, and I did not change settings after that.

Maybe someone has a suggestion for further investigation or how to partially revert the upgrade without reflashing.

Thanks

OK Now I am confused...

Only applet "runnning" IPStrength. N800 in SoftPowerOff.

Battery was dead this morning.

Will have to download the battery-status app and see what is really going on....

i have seen modest get stuck in ram after a mail check, and i have it reported here:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3610

it seems to do so at close to random. and while it seems to not put any specific strain on the cpu, i cant help wonder if it stops the tablet from going idle...

just a wild fling, but whats happening under the hood when the device is locked but bluetooth is still enabled?

If another BT device passes in range, what actually kicks in and does stuff, or is it all manual and sits there silently doing nothing?

When I was having drastic battery problems I tried running top and stuff and looking at the logs there was no specific process sitting there busy, does it make sense that if its not a process then its a piece of hardware coming alive and being busy without the OS intervening?

is this even possible without the OS knowing?

could it be something like the wifi hardware not actually fully disabling itself after disconnecting, or something to do with the DSP not settling down after playing tunes at the evening?

unless the device is actively looking for other devices, i dont think the bluetooth radio is sending data. and even if it gets a message to make itself known, it will only reply if it set to visible.

beyond that i dont think bluetooth do much unless one is actively using the connection.

and wifi is much the same.

yes, having these radios turned on while not being used, can create more drain then having them turned of. but i would guess that its very much like having a cpu on idle. that is, the wattage used should be in the 0.something range...

the word there is "should".
I agree all these things should not draw any power (or much) when not in use, I was asking if somehow a piece of hardware was not going back to idle because of some race condition or other.