Optimus V Battery Drain Optimization Tests Part 2

I just did some tests, and I am wrong about this. If you set your lower clock speed too low and then try to stream audio, the clock speed will jump to the max value (if not permanently, then frequently). But if you have the lower clock speed set to ~600 and above, the governor is smart enough to figure out that 600MHz is doing the job and will leave the clock speed there. So there is an advantage to setting a lower clock speed when doing streaming/time dependent tasks, but only if that lower speed is fast enough for the task at hand. If the clock is set too low, the governor will default back to the max clock speed.

Aww man this is getting complicated.

I feel like we need a double blind study with 10 phones and a few months of data to get to the bottom of this....Or you guys can post your phone usage results.

Thanks for confirming this Marzz.

I was going to post, a counter when I saw this post of yours.
There is a definite difference in heat and battery life with it downclocked. It's interesting with the spikes.

It is complicated but yeah, somewhere between 400 and 600 is probably the sweet spot. The hardpart is how different apps use the power.

This is just a guess for lows, but if you:
Stream compressed music 400 is probably fine
Gps, 400-600 is probably best. The gps generates some heat too I think.
Listening to MP3's, 400 is probably okay.
For combining, you probably want closer to 600.
If all you do is text, call, play games, then no scaling is probably best.

Remember heat kills your battery in terms of juice and lifespan of the battery itself.
 
I have been running 600/787 for 4 days now, and with the exception of one day having a major issue with the camera (drained my phone in 1.25 hours, had to boot to recovery and wipe caches to fix whatever was happening), I've been getting the best battery performance yet. For example, today I unplugged at 7am, and it's now almost 7pm and I've got 69% left.

Usage today: 6 short calls, checked email every half hour, sent a bunch or texts, viewed several dozen webpages, and performed tests with the camera (yesterday was a nightmare), OpenSignal, and SpeedTest, as well as light usage of several other apps, oh yeah and listened to music while in the shower.

I'm running aospCM7, ADW, no live wallpapers, 5 widgets (youtube, news&weather, weatherbug, music, & market), and the governor is set to interactive with 600/787.

Thanks for all the data in this thread! I feel as if I'm finally getting a grip on good battery life, and the ironic thing is my cheap china ebay batteries just arrived today! ;)
 
so i shouldn't even bother with interactive governor?

I think she meant having the governor change the clock speed on demand is not needed for those situations. Meaning, setting the min/max to the same value is best for texting, calling, and playing games.
 
so far i've got an uptime of about 19 hours and i'm at 39% -- but i did switch the min/max about halfway thru the day, so i don't know if this affected it at all :-\
 
I think she meant having the governor change the clock speed on demand is not needed for those situations. Meaning, setting the min/max to the same value is best for texting, calling, and playing games.

Correct.
 
Depending on my day, always at least 1hr of music, checking messages/time 2x per hour, some casual apps: checking twitter, facebook, fantasy baseball and some eventual web browser. Some days, give or take, i might play an hour/hourhalf of gameboid or angry birds.

With the stockrom, i would unplug at 6am, after some medium load use(twitter, facebook, texting, maybe 1 phone call and a game or two, i'd be out of battery by 2pm.

I installed JuiceDefender and now the battery lasted enough for me to get back home at around 5 with about +-10% battery.

After i got sick of the slow cpu speeds, i decided to go ahead and root, etc, aosp cm7, OC'd to stockMIN/748/onD, i recharged the battery and it managed until i got home without juicedefender with bout +-15% left, so that wasn't too bad.

for my 4th time, i went ahead and installed juicedefender for the heck of it, see what kind of results i would get. By the time i got home, i had about 32% battery left.

Now i'm seeing people saying to set it @ 600/748/Int, so i want to test that out and see how long my battery last. I'll report back on that!

Keep up the good work OP!
 
Depending on my day, always at least 1hr of music, checking messages/time 2x per hour, some casual apps: checking twitter, facebook, fantasy baseball and some eventual web browser. Some days, give or take, i might play an hour/hourhalf of gameboid or angry birds.

With the stockrom, i would unplug at 6am, after some medium load use(twitter, facebook, texting, maybe 1 phone call and a game or two, i'd be out of battery by 2pm.

I installed JuiceDefender and now the battery lasted enough for me to get back home at around 5 with about +-10% battery.

After i got sick of the slow cpu speeds, i decided to go ahead and root, etc, aosp cm7, OC'd to stockMIN/748/onD, i recharged the battery and it managed until i got home without juicedefender with bout +-15% left, so that wasn't too bad.

for my 4th time, i went ahead and installed juicedefender for the heck of it, see what kind of results i would get. By the time i got home, i had about 32% battery left.

Now i'm seeing people saying to set it @ 600/748/Int, so i want to test that out and see how long my battery last. I'll report back on that!

Keep up the good work OP!

Yeah you need to look at the apps you had installed and see what's killing your battery... I know I had to do some tweaking when I first got the phone to get respectable battery life, but now I can get 36-48 hours on the stock ROM pretty easily with light-regular use (some twitter/facebook/texting and couple calls) and JuiceDefender. I'm still in the habit of plugging my phone in every night, but often my phone is at 85%+ when I plug it in after 16 hours off the charger...

If I play some games, obviously I see more significant battery drain, but still I never risk not making it through a workday.
 
mmarz

For your setcpu tests, I noticed that you only used rodimus, with the xionia kernel. Would using a different kernel give different results... and would you be up to testing some other kernels in the same manner, like picasticks, bumblebee, aosp, etc.?

The reason I'm asking is because having the clock speed max and min values set so high as you recommended drain the battery on my aospmod rom (and aosp's kernel) like crazy. I also noticed the same thing with another poster on xda that set their min/max both to 787 (because of your data, with a link to this thread), and got horrible battery life. When I turned the min value down to 245, the battery life increased dramatically (once again, with the aosp kernel).

But high min/max values seems to conserve battery on the setcpu tests with rodimus and xionia. Maybe different kernels have different min/max values for the best battery life?
 
It took me a minute to figure out what was wrong with what you were saying...

You need to read the entire thread.
We (many of us, most?) no longer advocate running a high minimum clock, or low for that matter. Too high a minimum has been found to be just as bad as too low of a minimum. Yes, each rom has a preferred sweet spot, but it shouldn't vary too much. What has more impact on it is how you use your phone. It's not cut and dried, nor is what you should run an easy thing to pinpoint.


The roms tested in this have changed a lot since. AOSP has changed a ton and gained a lot of battery life, Aphrodite is pretty much a dead rom (Harmonia replaced a lot of it), Stock + Xionia was essentially dead when this test was done, and Rodimus has changed a bit since (I think).

Testing the current crop is a big job, as we now have even more options, but also, to mix and match kernels could double or even triple that work.
 
I've been busy with a few other projects (my CNC mill blew up yesterday), otherwise I've finished my last round of tests. I need to write it up and I'll post it within a few days.

Topics I will cover:
How your Kernel effects battery life
How your Rom effects battery life
The ultimate system settings to get the most out of your phone.

@ theboundless
I may have been a bit hasty with my conclusion that you should set the min and max CPU speed to the same value. Here are situations where this would hurt battery life:
Streaming music
Surfing the web
Talking on the phone
Or any other low CPU intensive, extended period task.

Here are situations where it will help:
Leaving the phone on idle and having occasional tasks occur (check GPS location)
Editing files
Downloading/uploading files
Or any other finite time task

By not wasting time with the lower clock speed, your system should finish these types of tasks using less energy than if your system had attempted a lower less efficient clock speed first. If you are just concerned about standby battery life, setting both the min/max to the highest stable clock speed will help.

Try this, flash nothing but a rom and setcpu. Set the min/max to the same high value. Test how long the phone lasts. Now set the min low and the max to 600. You'll probably notice a decrease in battery life.

You talk about trying different kernels and roms to get better battery life. Here is a little spoiler on what I will post in my last set of tests. Your rom/kernel have little to no effect on your battery life. No matter what you have flashed, you can manually change your settings/uninstall apps and get the best battery life out of your phone. If you suffer poor battery life on the Optimus V (less than 24 hours), it is because of one of the following:
You are a heavy user of your phone
You have installed applications battery hungry applications
You have flashed a rom/kernel that has a bug

If your rom/kernel has no bugs, you should get over two days of standby time with minimal use.
 
@leslieann,

I have read the entire thread, thanks :) And I have been one of the few to actually employ mmarz's rather lengthy droidwall profiles / Tasker setup (I'm that dedicated good battery life). And I've read a good amount of your threads too, and tried a few of your roms. Sorry if I sounded like I just jumped into this conversation out of the blue, but I have tested different values, high min/max values, mid-min/high-max values, and low-min/high max values primarily with aosp's rom and kernel for a while now, and even what you recommended as the "sweet spot" (min 480 or 600/ max 786) drains the battery (on aosp's kernel) rather quickly. The only way I could the battery to last on aosp was to set the min extremely low (122 or 245). I wondered why I couldn't reproduce the great battery life results you guys where getting when you raised the min value to medium/high levels. And then I noticed that for mmarz's setcpu tests, he only used rodimus, which comes with xionia. That's when I wondered if aosp's kernel functioned differently than xionia's, in which the best min/max cpu values had to be set differently for optimal battery life. Not just slightly different, but drastically different.

All that being said, recently I switched out the kernel, still using aosp's rom for all the goodies, but now using xionia 10. And presto, I can now set the min value to 6000 and the battery lasts just fine, no drainage issues at all (this would not be possible with aosp's kernel unless I wanted almost 10% drain an hour on idle). With the xionia kernel, I pretty much now have identical results as most people on this thread report, and of course is consistent with mmarz' setcpu tests. The kernel switch seemed to make a big difference.

I don't pretend to know why aosp's kernel drains so much battery when the min value is set medium or high, I'm just reporting my results to you guys, so don't shoot the messenger :) As far as I can tell, battery life decreases dramatically on aosp's kernel when raising the minimum clock speed to a medium or high level. If aosp's kernal has anything like a sweet spot, it seems to be 245/806. This seems extremely different from xionia's kernel and maybe others.
 
@leslieann,
All that being said, recently I switched out the kernel, still using aosp's rom for all the goodies, but now using xionia 10. And presto, I can now set the min value to 6000 and the battery lasts just fine, no drainage issues at all (this would not be possible with aosp's kernel unless I wanted almost 10% drain an hour on idle). With the xionia kernel, I pretty much now have identical results as most people on this thread report, and of course is consistent with mmarz' setcpu tests. The kernel switch seemed to make a big difference.

I don't pretend to know why aosp's kernel drains so much battery when the min value is set medium or high, I'm just reporting my results to you guys, so don't shoot the messenger :) As far as I can tell, battery life decreases dramatically on aosp's kernel when raising the minimum clock speed to a medium or high level. If aosp's kernal has anything like a sweet spot, it seems to be 245/806. This seems extremely different from xionia's kernel and maybe others.
I remember reading our chipset won't even go below 2xx mhz, I know some roms report it, but it doesn't supposedly work.

That is odd about AOSP, then again, we haven't really had much testing done with the new Virgin based kernels, which may turn around and follow the same results you are seeing. These results were all based on older kernels, none of which were really built for this phone, so things certainly may be a lot different. Maybe we need a new "book".
 
This isn't quite off topic, thought I'd mention it.
I had a week with no phone service due to a billing error, so I did a little test myself.
I fully charged and then put my phone in airplane mode while it sat idle to see how the battery would hold up.
Ooo! Over 5days8hrs completely idle except for checking the clock from time to time and my battery charge dropped all the way to 68%.
Sure, it was basically a paperweight, but no substantial drain over quite a while.
ROM: aospCmodOV4252011 and associated kernel
Autokiller memory optimizer used to kill all unnecessary (IMO) processes
 
^^ I did the same thing when I had my phone a month before activation. I got over 7 days by keeping the phone in airplane mode and checking the clock occasionally. If only the phone could be more efficient when using its radios then it would be even better.
 
I was just thinking back to beepers way back when. They could receive a signal just about anywhere, and yet they had a battery life that makes me long for the old days! ;)

Why can't a smartphone listen for an initiation signal like a beeper did, then connect to the tower?

Edit: I just googled it, and it seems to be an issue with cdma, which attempts to always stay connected, and ups the power used when the signal is poor.
 

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