How to deal with wakelocks on a Verizon M9?

DarkScythe

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Jul 9, 2010
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Hey everyone,

I've got a hopefully quick question; I've been monitoring my new M9 for any irregularities, and the first up is the battery.

I've gotten GSAM up and running, and for the past two days I've left the phone alone intentionally after a full charge.
It's been connected to Wifi for quite a while (my router is literally 2 feet away from it.)

The standby drain hasn't been horrible, but having just checked GSAM, it seems like something may be waking the device pretty often. Unfortunately, I can't figure out what.

According to the stats, as of right now, the phone has been unplugged and running off battery for 38 hours and 44 minutes, but an astounding 19 hours and 51 minutes of that time has been "Held awake" which seems excessive to me.

In terms of "App usage" there are only 3 things that appear at the top with anything more than 1% total battery usage:
"Kernel (Android OS)" sits at 32.9%
"Helium" sits at 20.9% (I used this initially to restore some backed up data from my old device, which is why I've been on Wifi.)
"Android System" sits at 15.6%
Everything else is 1% or less.

Unfortunately, as I'm not rooted, I don't believe I can run the Wakelock Detector app, so I'm kind of stuck here as far as my investigation goes.

Any ideas, or any other way for me to check into what specifically is waking my device? I mention Verizon specifically because I don't believe there's any way to root the Verizon M9's right now.

Thanks.

Edit:
Just checked the stock battery stats stuff.
According to that, "Android OS" is the largest consumer of the battery, and is listed as having over 19 hours of "Keep awake" time on its own.

Not too sure what I can do with that, though...
 
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SYMAWD

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When I first got my phone it was awake 99% of the time, but doing a restart (from the menu when you hold the power button) fixed it and it never came back.
 

DarkScythe

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Well, I did a factory restore early on before I started setting it up so I think it should have already gone through a reboot, but it doesn't hurt to reboot again I suppose.

In case it's still wakelocked though, is there no way to check into it without root?
 

SYMAWD

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Well, I did a factory restore early on before I started setting it up so I think it should have already gone through a reboot, but it doesn't hurt to reboot again I suppose.

In case it's still wakelocked though, is there no way to check into it without root?

Not that I know of. My DNA had a wake lock and I had to do a factory reset. I just backed everything up with Helium, put the files on my computer and then put them back after the factory reset.
 

DarkScythe

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Jul 9, 2010
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Well, that kind of sucks.

I technically already did a factory reset (twice, in fact.) I don't think doing it again is going to do anything.

As of right now though, I believe my phone is still afflicted with severe wakelocking.

It's been about 3 hours now on battery, and GSAM reports that my phone has spent 1 hour and 43 minutes being "Held awake."
As before, it seems that "Android OS" is the culprit, but I can't figure out how to drill deeper to figure out what part of it is errant.

Any help would be appreciated.
 

DarkScythe

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Ugh. Well, as an update, I think I figured it out.

While I'm waiting for root and such to be able to more easily and clearly track this down, I decided to try a disabling a couple more apps, disabling syncing and backups, and such. None of that really helped at all, but just before bed, I decided to try one more hunch and disable Wifi entirely. Figured it was worth a shot since some Google searching seems to say this may help.

This...seems to have done the trick.

It's been 8 hours overnight off the charger and the phone/GSAM reports only four minutes of time held awake; Previously it would be on the order of at least 4 hours!
Thanks to the massive reduction, it also only drained about 3% of its battery in those 8 hours, versus the drain rate of 2-3% per hour with Wifi on.

Maybe this will help anyone else in my position having to deal with this. Perhaps it's well known, but it certainly wasn't known to me, since I don't upgrade or tweak my phones all that often. This M9 is my third smartphone ever (coming from a Droid Incredible and a Droid DNA) and at least in previous versions, I was under the impression that being on Wifi actually helped battery life over staying on mobile data. And before anyone asks, "Scanning always available" under Wifi advanced settings has been disabled from the very beginning. Even "Wifi optimization" which claims to minimize battery use was enabled.

I guess I'll just make it a point to stay on mobile data all the time, since I still have my unlimited data package from Verizon, so there's little need for me to be on Wifi unless I need to use Helium to restore some data.
 

IAmSixNine

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Jun 1, 2010
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Ive been saying this for a while. LOL
I noticed it using SystemPannel. That app shows CPU usage and drain percentage.
I got really anal about checking my device late nights early mornings and found that with WiFi on over night my CPU usage was steadily at 30% even though battery drain was low.
I decided to turn WiFi off and over night my CPU usage would vary from 3-10% with spikes every 30 minutes to 50%. Im assuming the spikes were maybe email checking or weather updating.
Definitely annoying little bug in my opinion.
 

MedicD

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Yes. I've been troubleshooting my Note 4 battery and I have come to the conclusion that the best way to deal with it is to just turn WiFi off completely. I'm still on Verizon unlimited data so that's not an issue for me. I'll connect to WiFi if I have to download some GB files just for speed
 

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