S3 battery draining but not by CPU

[miksh]

Hi all,

Recently I started experiencing the very quick battery discharge (~50% during 3-5 hours) on my Rogers S3 when no activity occurred. No new applications have been installed. There were a few updates installed by no one complained re. battery issues.
I thought that it could be due to a background process(es) so I monitored my S3 for a few days and eventually found that the highest discharge rate occurs when CPU utilization is 1% (see images below).

I wonder what could be the root cause and how (what tools to use) to troubleshoot it?

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Try Wakelock Detector, and see if some app is causing excessive partial wakelocks. Also, are those screenshots from the stock battery stats, or a 3rd party app? Try GSAM to monitor your battery.

 

[miksh]

Thanks, will try. I used SystemPanel.

 

[miksh]

Unfortunately GSAM didn't help (see its screenshots below). Thought that a low mobile signal is the root cause but it is not (if trust GSAM).
Still getting that issue from time to time. Usually everything is ok until something in Android core processes triggers the battery drain. It goes away after restart.

Will try Wakelock detector. Any suggestions so far? Did I miss the answer from the screenshots below?

 

[B. Diddy]

Man that sucks. I don't know why your kernel is burning so much battery. See what Wakelock Detector shows, but not sure it will help much, since it sounds like some system process is just working overtime.

 

[Golfdriver97]

I would try a reboot into recovery and clear system cache.

 

[miksh]

I think I found the pattern:
- the phone should be placed in a location with low signal, maybe downgraded from LTE to 4G for ~1 hr
- then some system resource starts draining the battery
- reboot fixes the issue

Hope to get more details soon.

 

[miksh]

Well, went to location with poor connection (4G/3G/E) and finally found out that smdcntl0 is running too long.
Any suggestions?