Database Users

Idle CPU Usage High

My HD2 is running at around 20% CPU usage when idle according to BATTClock. This is even after a hard reset with just Batclock installed, no radios on, and HTC Sense shutdown (just on old Windows today screen). Is this normal? No wonder the battery life is so short.
My Touch Pro generally shows 1-2% CPU usage when idle even with phone and push email on.
Task manager doesn't show any processes or application using that amount of CPU. Is it just Battclock that is wrong or is something else going on? I have turned off all location services.
Nick

Interesting fact. Needs more research though...

I've tried everything I can think of, including switching off automatic backlight sensing, location settings, etc. and Battclock still shows around 20% with nothing running. Any ideas for a more sophisticated tool to monitor the CPU? Does anyone else with Battclock installed notice this?

And if battclokck use 20% of cpu ?

dorigny said:
And if battclokck use 20% of cpu ?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
BattClock itself does use almost no CPU. But HD2 has the ability to lower the CPU speed. I use a Microsoft API to get the idle percentage. Apparently this Microsoft API does not correct for the CPU frequence change?
You can check with a Task Manager, which process consume how much CPU, like FdcSoft TaskMgr. Then you can also check if BattClock is wrong.
I am planning to add another method for measuring the CPU spent, so for now you can better first check if BattClock is right or not. I have a Touch Diamond and there the CPU percentage is reported the same as the Task Manager.

WEll, mine is 56% atm and i have no idea why.
the only reason i can think of is g-alarm and messenger live

On a device that changes the CPU clock to meet demands, CPU percentage means nothing if you don't have a way to know at the same time what the current clock is.
And yes, Battclock itself might not use a lot of CPU, but it seems its way to draw itself on top of the menu bar is not very efficient. A bit flaky, the redraws are not clean, and I wouldn't be surprised if the system calls it uses do use a lot of CPU.

kilrah said:
On a device that changes the CPU clock to meet demands, CPU percentage means nothing if you don't have a way to know at the same time what the current clock is.
And yes, Battclock itself might not use a lot of CPU, but it seems its way to draw itself on top of the menu bar is not very efficient. A bit flaky, the redraws are not clean, and I wouldn't be surprised if the system calls it uses do use a lot of CPU.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mmmm....I wonder what you're basing your comments on. Are you saying that ZuinigeRijder is lying?

kenkiller said:
Mmmm....I wonder what you're basing your comments on. Are you saying that ZuinigeRijder is lying?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The Qualcomm CPU, the one the HD2 has, reduces it's clock speed when it is not needed to run at full capacity to save battery life.
i.e. If the CPU is running at 1Ghz, and a program is using 1%, it will drop the clock speed (due to lack of activity). Say it then drops to 100Mhz, it will then be running at 10% of the CPU clock speed.

A simple way to check wether battclock influences the readings somehow (which I don't really believe) would be to turn it off and check, as zuinigerijder said, with fdcsoft advanced taskmanager.
BTW I also get ~20% usage when idle, in some manila interfaces I get to lowest values of 7%, but then back to ~15% and then again ~20%
No way to know the current clock of the cpu?

rp-x1 said:
The Qualcomm CPU, the one the HD2 has, reduces it's clock speed when it is not needed to run at full capacity to save battery life.
i.e. If the CPU is running at 1Ghz, and a program is using 1%, it will drop the clock speed (due to lack of activity). Say it then drops to 100Mhz, it will then be running at 10% of the CPU clock speed.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think you've hit the nail on the head. When I start a new program the CPU% drops briefly to 1-2% before climbing again. I guess this is the device ramping the processor back up before launching the program, hence dropping idle usage from 10-20% of say 100Mhzto 1-2% of 1000MHz.
Cheers
Nick

Extract ,power settings, from omnia 2,is it possible?Put it on htc hd2,in cab format,regulate the speed on the CPU and save the battery life?Anyone?

Deep sleep question.

Just one simple question. When phone is in deep sleep, the cpu's running speed is the min frequency I choose from the cpu settings or a default lower one?
I use smart ass 2 with min at 768 and max at 1516 . So in deep sleep my phone is running at 768?
Thanks in advance...
Sent from my Huawei u8800 using XDA Premium App

spirosbond said:
Just one simple question. When phone is in deep sleep, the cpu's running speed is the min frequency I choose from the cpu settings or a default lower one?
I use smart ass 2 with min at 768 and max at 1516 . So in deep sleep my phone is running at 768?
Thanks in advance...
Sent from my Huawei u8800 using XDA Premium App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not 100% sure but freq is minimum as it can be. And if cpu is not used no metter is freq 10000MHZ or 300Mhz it uses almost the same power. But when cpu is in use freq is important to power usage. Freq management is good not because it lowers freq but because it lets use lower freq on things that is not require hi freq. so it saves LITTLE LITTLE BIT of power. In idle mode (deep sleep) no meter what freq is.
But i still don't understand the need of governor. It's good only in cases where you overclock cpu but if don't - i don't see why it should be used.
PS Use app called CPU SPY it shows on what freq your cpu is being used and how much of the time.

Thanks! I use CPU SPY and it says tha about 60% or more is in deep sleep, 15%-25% is at 768 and the rest higher, which seems to be a good thing. But my phone still lasts for about 10-15 hours with normal use.
So i thought that maybe my min 768 frequency drain a lot of battery.
To clear things up a bit I use latest oxigen rom+latest franco kernel+zram+Juwe ram script...

Actually deep-sleep state is a special state supported by your phone MCU. In this state, a lot of functionality (therefore a lot of logical gates) are disabled thus MCU consumes very low power compared to normal functioning states. The thing about a CPU/MCU is when it is running even if there are no work to do no code to process, it has to run some command. While idle it must run NOOP (no-operand / no operation) command or do something equally unnecessary like counting a not required number. But in deep sleep mode, MCU actually stops working except for core functions to keep your phone going on.
Think about it this way, in a normal working state, CPUs most basic functionality is to read a command from memory, execute it and proceed to the next command to continue. Thus, in an operating system or a single purpose embedded software, CPU/MCU has to execute a "do nothing" command when you have no job to give it. But even a "do nothing" command need all of the MCU/CPU resources to be kept readily available. If you're sure that you have absolutely no job for your MCU/CPU to do, what you can do is to tell it to go and sleep fr a while until you wake it up again. In sleep, MCU/CPU can shut down a lot of its support systems like math processing, external memory access, graphics related functions (if any), even IO outputs. Depending on your CPU/MCU, this means until an interrupt occurs or a special sub system wakes it up, most of the sub-systems within your MCU/CPU thus may be millions of transistors will not be working so, your CPU/MCU will not consume as much power.
In layman's terms, deep-sleep state is a special state that shut down most of your MCU in your phone, thus while crippling it by removing its ability to function, making sure that it doesn't consumes much power. So OS (Android) (with the help of some additional hardware) controls when your MCU will sleep and under what circumstances it will wake. So it shuts down the engine -so to speak- when you're not using it for long terms and saving fuel rather than leaving your car on idle.
Hope this helps..

Thanks t_d_z. That is also how I imagined things...
But what is wrong with my battery which today, for example, went 33% down in 5 hours with 68% (from cpu spy) in deep sleep, without wi-fi on.
As i said above, I use latest oxigen rom+latest franco kernel+zram+Juwe ram script+smarass2 governor...
I also calibrated my battery by wiping battery stats, like i read in a post.
I have read in an other forum that if you use smartass (I use smartass2) or ondemand (I think...) governors, the governor is learning your habits and after a week you see the difference. Is that true?
Finally, can you guys who have "good" battery life, post your settings? (By settings I mean: rom, kernel, governor with cpu parameters, how you use the phone and everything else you think is important).
Thanks again...

I get about two days of battery life. I use Oxygen without any modifications. CPU is min. 245 (or something like that with 200, I dunno now) and max. is 800. Wifi is always on when I am home.
Try installing Oxygen-r1 and use it with a full battery, do not change anything and do not install too many apps. There will be apps that just won't stop running (like BBC or CNN app), I do not install those. Then you will see how long your battery lasts. If you just write some messages throughout the day and call somebody for 1-3 hours you should get about 2 days.
Then install your apps and test it again - maybe your apps are the problem.

spirosbond said:
Thanks t_d_z. That is also how I imagined things...
But what is wrong with my battery which today, for example, went 33% down in 5 hours with 68% (from cpu spy) in deep sleep, without wi-fi on.
As i said above, I use latest oxigen rom+latest franco kernel+zram+Juwe ram script+smarass2 governor...
I also calibrated my battery by wiping battery stats, like i read in a post.
I have read in an other forum that if you use smartass (I use smartass2) or ondemand (I think...) governors, the governor is learning your habits and after a week you see the difference. Is that true?
Finally, can you guys who have "good" battery life, post your settings? (By settings I mean: rom, kernel, governor with cpu parameters, how you use the phone and everything else you think is important).
Thanks again...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Look not at cpu spy but in battery usage to find out what drains your battery. And i can tell All roms are kinda lame in terms of battery, except CM7. In deep sleep it takes about 7% of battery in 10hours. I tried all roms but non of them was so efficient. But latest franco kernel (which i think even more improves cm7 rom) does not support cm7 right now, so i've attached older version if you would like to test cm7+franco kernel.
With normal usage of 50 sms and 30minutes of calls and sometimes wi-fi to download few apps and 20minutes on easy games my battery lats about 18hours. Whan only sms it lasts 30hours. depends how long lcd is on

Well, I'm not an expert on smart phone OSes but I'm an expert on embedded systems and micro controllers. If the designers are not really stupid (which I'm sure they are not) all the peripherals gets suspended when the main CPU goes to deep sleep mode. So, it is almost impossible for the phone to consume much power in deep sleep state. Most likely your phone consumes that power the rest of the time when it is not in sleep mode. I agree with Tommixoft, you should use battery usage info rather than CPU spy to find what drains your battery. Also, here is a quick check list about what consumes power :
1. Screen, especially when it is brightly lit
2. GSM network (Even when you're not talking to phone, GPRS/Edge/3G network communications drains almost as much power)
3. Wireless network
4. GPS
As an additional note, if your phone is not going to sleep mode regularly try to uninstall applications that have "prevent phone from sleeping" security setting.
Hope this helps, and of course there are a lot of more experienced people in the forum that knows about the details of the kernel so they might provide additional info.
Regards,
---------- Post added at 05:15 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:10 PM ----------
Oh I forgot to tell the MOST important thing, 768MHz is way too high a value to set as minimal frequency. Try to set it 245. I use 122 MHz and it work pretty well. Don't forget, when you need the CPU power, the governor will provide it for you.

[Q] Some questions about adjusting voltage

Hey guys. I have two questions about CPU voltage control on the Qualcomm Note 3:
1. Trickster Mod, my main go to app for undervolting, is only able to provide relatively large steps (eg. 945mv -> 932.5mv), however CPU Adjuster is able to provide much finer steps (I would provide examples, but the sensitivty of the voltage meter is too high ). Is the CPU actually capable to use voltage steps as fine as that provided by CPU Frequency?
2. When is the voltage actually applied? Immediately? I ask because there are times whereby if I change the voltage while Antutu is actually running, the phone doesn't freeze or crash, even when the voltage is obviously too low, which seems to suggest that the voltage isn't actually being applied. (yet). After the benchmark finishes the phone then crashes. Also, I have made sure that I'm changing the voltage for the clock speed the phone actually uses for the benchmark, by setting a lower limit (like 1.49 Ghz).
Thanks in advance :laugh:

High load average (CPU Overlay)

I've rooted my N4 yesterday and since then my battery is dying quicker than before. The weird thing is, that there are no wakelooks present, but the average load is really high (see the screens below). I've had xposed installed, but removed it to locate the problem exactly.
So do you see similar values? To check it, open up the developer options and check the "Show CPU usage" (nearly at the bottom).
up.picr.de/19973329mr.jpg
up.picr.de/19973330it.jpg
In my case system_server is causing the high load, at least this is what the overlay suggests. Any thoughts?
Cheers,
flxx

Hi, mine not so high, 1.5-2.0 in idle, but still is high because, on other 4 core smartfone (Cortex-A9) I have 0.05 in idle time.

yep, my note edge (posting here because there's more people) has the same values.. 13/13/13 , I don' think it's normal (they should be around 1 shouldnt they?) but have no idea how to change that...
also system_server is the top process in my case too..
If anyone else could post their results here it would be a great help since I can't find anything online about how these values are supposed to look on a note 4..

Also high CPU load average
I have a Galaxy Note Edge on 5.1.1 and I also wonder why I have like 13/15/18 idle CPU load average. Just like OP, system_server and com.android.systemui and surfaceflinger are usually the top 3 when idle.
I used Trepn Power Profiler and also saw my CPU frequency of CPU1 and CPU2 always fluctuates between 0.4 to 1.2Ghz and that System UI always uses 3-4% in CPU monitor.

Undervolting

What voltages can I set for frequencies from 2457 MHz? For now I have such voltage settings.

You must've spent a lot of time perfecting that. Can you remind me of your SoC's PSV value? Boeffla's app lists it in the Overview section as ASV/PSV.
I tried your 600 mV idle voltage on my PSV 9 phone. Didn't work, got a soft reboot. 625 mV seems to work. Seems crazy this is possible when the stock idle voltage is around 775 mV.
https://forum.xda-developers.com/htc-one-m8/general/guide-snapdragon-801-clocking-voltage-t2807173
edit: Tested for a few hours. Currently using
990 mV - 2534 MHz
1010 mV -2611 MHz
1030 mV - 2764 MHz
1045 mV - 2841 MHz
1075 mV - 2899 MHz
Seems stable in stability tests, haven't tried in daily use yet. If you want to increase the max speed the sweet spot is probably 2764 or 2841.
If you haven't seen this chart yet it has estimated voltages for each PVS binning on speeds above stock, maybe it's what you're looking for. According to the table the "worst" voltage a terrible PVS stock phone will use is 1120 mV. If you do not exceed that while overclocking your phone will probably be okay.
Thanks for the voltage references, I'll use them to tweak some more!
I came up with a stability test that hopefully tests phone stability without causing it to burn up. You just need the Boeffla app and Termux.
-Make a separate Boeffla profile
-Manually select and apply the new profile every time you're testing the undervolt
-Add some extra startup delay in the Boeffla settings
-In the Boeffla app change the Tuned governor's profile to "Performance". The normal profiles don't really care about using high CPU states so you need this.
-Don't change the hotplugger, default is "Tuned"
-Reduce your max charging speed for AC and USB to 1200 mA if you want to do testing with a charger plugged in
-Try to start on 100% charge so less heat is generated charging
-Lock the GPU to 27 MHz. Why not? The screen will be off anyways.
-Make undervolting adjustments to your CPU states' voltages. Only tweak the values of one or two states at a time.
-Adjust the minimum and maximum CPU speeds with the sliders so your phone is more likely to hit the states you just tweaked. If you just tweaked a low CPU state set it to the minimum speed, and if you just tweaked a high CPU state set it to the maximum speed etc.
-Launch Termux and then "Acquire Wakelock" in the menu or in the notification bar
-Run this one-liner:
while true; do openssl speed -evp aes-256-gcm; sleep 15s; done
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Explanation: No real reason to do it this way. Openssl's speed benchmark with AES is a cheap way to test CPU stability on many computer systems. This runs a benchmark on 1 thread, sleeps for 15s to let the phone cool off for a bit, and repeats. If the phone isn't throttling it will typically max out the CPU clock of the core the thread's running on. Sometimes you can spot anomalies when the benchmark scores deviate a lot. You can also add -multi [# of cores you want to test on] to run the test on more cores but this may heat up the phone too much and cause anomalies.
-Give your phone some cooling with a fan or something or put it on top of something that dissipates heat.
-Turn the screen off to keep heat down or keep it on low brightness.
-Check the phone once in a while to see if it's still stable
-If you are happy continue adjusting other values
-This test isn't perfect because it's not representative of real-world use but hopefully it's close enough :silly:
-The battery generally doesn't like it when it goes above 40C just pointing this out :silly:
-Possible alternative stress test: dim the screen to minimum brightness and play a video the phone doesn't really like such as webms
-If your phone is looping from bad settings just hold power + vol down + home to force a hard reboot

Boatshow said:
You must've spent a lot of time perfecting that. Can you remind me of your SoC's PSV value? Boeffla's app lists it in the Overview section as ASV/PSV.
I tried your 600 mV idle voltage on my PSV 9 phone. Didn't work, got a soft reboot. 625 mV seems to work. Seems crazy this is possible when the stock idle voltage is around 775 mV.
https://forum.xda-developers.com/htc-one-m8/general/guide-snapdragon-801-clocking-voltage-t2807173
edit: Tested for a few hours. Currently using
990 mV - 2534 MHz
1010 mV -2611 MHz
1030 mV - 2764 MHz
1045 mV - 2841 MHz
1075 mV - 2899 MHz
Seems stable in stability tests, haven't tried in daily use yet. If you want to increase the max speed the sweet spot is probably 2764 or 2841.
If you haven't seen this chart yet it has estimated voltages for each PVS binning on speeds above stock, maybe it's what you're looking for. According to the table the "worst" voltage a terrible PVS stock phone will use is 1120 mV. If you do not exceed that while overclocking your phone will probably be okay.
Thanks for the voltage references, I'll use them to tweak some more!
I came up with a stability test that hopefully tests phone stability without causing it to burn up. You just need the Boeffla app and Termux.
-Make a separate Boeffla profile
-Manually select and apply the new profile every time you're testing the undervolt
-Add some extra startup delay in the Boeffla settings
-In the Boeffla app change the Tuned governor's profile to "Performance". The normal profiles don't really care about using high CPU states so you need this.
-Don't change the hotplugger, default is "Tuned"
-Reduce your max charging speed for AC and USB to 1200 mA if you want to do testing with a charger plugged in
-Try to start on 100% charge so less heat is generated charging
-Lock the GPU to 27 MHz. Why not? The screen will be off anyways.
-Make undervolting adjustments to your CPU states' voltages. Only tweak the values of one or two states at a time.
-Adjust the minimum and maximum CPU speeds with the sliders so your phone is more likely to hit the states you just tweaked. If you just tweaked a low CPU state set it to the minimum speed, and if you just tweaked a high CPU state set it to the maximum speed etc.
-Launch Termux and then "Acquire Wakelock" in the menu or in the notification bar
-Run this one-liner:
Explanation: No real reason to do it this way. Openssl's speed benchmark with AES is a cheap way to test CPU stability on many computer systems. This runs a benchmark on 1 thread, sleeps for 15s to let the phone cool off for a bit, and repeats. If the phone isn't throttling it will typically max out the CPU clock of the core the thread's running on. Sometimes you can spot anomalies when the benchmark scores deviate a lot. You can also add -multi [# of cores you want to test on] to run the test on more cores but this may heat up the phone too much and cause anomalies.
-Give your phone some cooling with a fan or something or put it on top of something that dissipates heat.
-Turn the screen off to keep heat down or keep it on low brightness.
-Check the phone once in a while to see if it's still stable
-If you are happy continue adjusting other values
-This test isn't perfect because it's not representative of real-world use but hopefully it's close enough :silly:
-The battery generally doesn't like it when it goes above 40C just pointing this out :silly:
-Possible alternative stress test: dim the screen to minimum brightness and play a video the phone doesn't really like such as webms
-If your phone is looping from bad settings just hold power + vol down + home to force a hard reboot
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have PSV 10. My current undervolting.