I had this following experience, may be useful for any others hence posting my adventures.
Upgraded OTA to 4.3. Observed heavy drain on battery. down to less than 50% in a few hours, even without using. Checked battery on settings, it said "Media" is a large user - sometimes even more than screen. Browsed websites, found this was a widespread problem reported after 4.3 upgrade... so 4.3 is bad??? Thought so at first. Took suggestions from all people posting on the subject, formatted SD card, installed battery doctor, installed wakelock detector, many other stuff... some small improvement but "media" is still draining battery. Battery doctor always reported "Media" as the highest user.
Rooted the phone for the next step, installed more apps (titanium bu, root app delete, greenify etc.) disabled (froze) many apps, still media is draining. Only additional info I got from all these actions were that a process called "android.process.media" is using up all my battery.
More browsing the net, more research, more failures... then I saw one very sensible post, though I lost the thread. Thanks to him wherever he is !!! Summarized below:
Anytime the phone starts all the media are scanned by the android system. If the scanner comes across a corrupted file the system continues scanning. (This was not my problem, the next one was). Some SD cards may be defective. For example, SanDisk cards before 2012 were known to be defective, especially the 32 GB. Resulting in the the card dismounting itself and remounting, every time it remounts there will be a media scan.( Looking back I recall having seen a notification the card is not readable, and then in a few seconds it gets reset).
Well... I replaced my SanDisk 32 GB with another 16 GB card (cheap brand!!) that I had handy, no more battery drain on media.
Today after 5 hours I still have 90% battery left, and no consumption against "Media". I had also reversed most of my freezes.
Reminded me of the principle known as "Occam's Razor". Almost always there exist a simple explanation for the unknown, even when matters get very complicated (or made to get complicated)... ha ha... Anyway I learned how to root my phone, etc. Now why it started after upgrade to 4.3? Beats me.
Thanks to the advisor whose thread I lost. Cheers!!!
05-04-2014 02:56 AM