4.25.10 - Heavy battery drain even with minimal usage

[flipzmode]

• I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates
• I am submitting a bug report for existing functionality that does not work as intended
• I have read https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/wiki/Submitting-useful-bug-reports
• This isn't a feature request or a discussion topic

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Bug description

Ever since upgrading to 4.25.10 about 2 weeks ago I have seen heavy battery drain. I am a longtime Signal user (around 3 years) and have never had battery drain issues like this. Even with minimal Signal use, it is listed as the app that drains the most battery every day. Nothing on my phone changed other than Signal updating.

Steps to reproduce

• Can't really say how to reproduce it. This started happening as soon as I updated to 4.25.10.
• I did try disabling Signal as my default SMS app just to see if it helped somehow, but it's still the same.
• I have also restarted my phone and cleared out lots of old messages just to see if it somehow helped.
• This does not appear to be related to 4.20.4 - Battery and performance issues #7839 which is not only fixed already, but also I'm not having any issues with performance. But I did switch to system emoji to test and it didn't help any.

Actual result: Even with very low usage, Signal drains more battery than every other app on my phone.

Expected result: Battery drain should be minimal.

Screenshots

Device info

Device: LG V35 Thinq (AT&T)

Android version: 8.0.0. Security patch level July 1, 2018
Signal version: 4.25.10

Link to debug log

Debug log

[haaveilen]

I am having exactly same problem on Moto Z Play (2016). Also running 8.0.0.

The drain is serious (it drains about 30% of all battery, with almost no use. I hope it gets fixed asap.

[greyson-signal]

@flipzmode Is it accurate that you actually had 30 min of active use of Signal at that time? If so, it would seem that relative to other apps its battery usage is fine. It would have been run 10x more than the next most-used app, but using less than 10x the battery as the next app. If 30 min isn't accurate then that's a problem.

In general, the only good way to debug battery issues is to get something called a "bug report" from the system that can then be viewed in a tool like battery historian. However, those reports contain a full profile of all of your app usage, so I recommend against posting them on a public forum. Instead, if either of you are interested in providing a bug report to help diagnose this, you can DM me on the forum where I can give you more instructions.

Thanks!

[flipzmode]

Hey @greyson-signal, I'll work with you on getting a bug report from battery historian. I'm doing my best to try and pinpoint the best way to replicate battery drain. Meaning where I know I'm not using Signal, but it is draining. I've spent a few days out of work and so my usage has been different than normal.

I am curious if @haaveilen uses the Signal desktop app at all. I use it heavily all day on Windows and I'm just realizing I'm wondering if that's part of why battery drain seems worse than usual. It used to be that if I was using the desktop app then I wouldn't receive a notification of an inbound message on Android right away. If I was actively using the desktop app and replied to a message fairly quickly, it would never notify on my phone. At some point it changed and now I get notifications on my phone and on the desktop at the same time. I believe this could be a source of extra battery drain from Signal. I don't know if that's something related to Android 8.0, or Signal Desktop, or Signal Android.

I'll get signed up on the forums soon and send you a DM. Thanks for the reply.

[greyson-signal]

If I was actively using the desktop app and replied to a message fairly quickly, it would never notify on my phone. At some point it changed and now I get notifications on my phone and on the desktop at the same time.

So technically your phone would always receive these notifications, we'd just display them silently. However, with the new changes to notification channels, these notifications will now make a noise, which is a known bug. So my gut tells me this isn't the source of the drain, but we'll see!

Looking forward to your DM. Thanks for assisting with this!

[haaveilen]

Hey @flipzmode, no I am not using Signal for desktop. I am regular user on Android. It seems like drain is not consistent as well (sometimes drain is more agressive, sometimes less). As of now I had actively used Signal for 25 minutes, it had drained 650mAh of battety, for instance Facebook that I used 1 hour, drained only 180mAh. Thank you for your input.

[greyson-signal]

FWIW I just used the new energy profiler in Android Studio 3.2, and I didn't notice any oddities on the couple phones I tested (Pixel 2 and Nexus 5X). Battery drain was classified as "light" when the app was open, and was basically non-existent when the app was backgrounded. I'm also not experiencing this battery drain in my day-to-day. So at minimum this seems to be situational or device-specific.

The only thing in 4.25.x that could impact energy usage IMO is the new logger that logs to a file. I imagine it's possible that some phones are really energy-inefficient when writing to files or something. Anyway, I'll need a bug report to get more details.

Thanks!

[gkkovacs]

@greyson-signal I've had a similar experience with 4.25.x, and now with 4.26.2 as well. According to the system battery settings, Signal now uses a similar amount of juice for 30-40 times less screen on time compared to Messenger (which I am a fairly heavy user of).

Device: LG G7 Thinq
Android version: 8.0.0. Security patch level July 1, 2018
Signal version: 4.26.2

Please tell me if I can give you any specific info to debug further.
The two screenshots are taken 4 days apart;

[greyson-signal]

@gkkovacs Thank you for the report. As mentioned in my first comment, it's good to know this is happening, but there's no action for me unless I have a Bug Report. A debug log taken at the end of the day may even be helpful to see what kind of work may have been taking place, but a Bug Report is much more useful for battery stuff. Refer to my earlier comment for details. Thanks!

[prg318]

Running into this issue on Android 9. I hardly ever even use Signal but when investigating saw that Signal is constantly in use in the background according to Android 9 battery statistics.

[greyson-signal]

@prg318 At minimum I'd need a debug log to see if anything is happening in the background. I'm also curious if you're in the beta. The beta bumped the targetsdk to 26, meaning we should have fewer opportunities to run in the background when we're not supposed to.

Anyway, besides a debug log, as mentioned in an earlier comment, to do any real analysis I'd need a bugreport.

[aaroecker]

I'm having the same issue. Here's my debug log:

https://debuglogs.org/41523615184aa9a2b9fcfe079c3b0d566be51c312d2445f7eef3678f486b01de

[greyson-signal]

@aaroecker Thanks for submitting a log! Looking at it, it seems like you're getting tons of contact sync requests from desktop and that you're likely in poor network conditions (because those requests keep failing). Can you tell me if you have a desktop instance you're keeping open, or if you were requesting a lot of contact imports on desktop or something?

[aaroecker]

I don't know, but I shouldn't anymore. I deteled signal from my phone and on my PC. I'm going to try a new install to see if that helps.

[aaroecker]

@greyson-signal thanks for looking into this.

[greyson-signal]

Ok, if this happens again, please send a desktop log along with your Android log. Might be some weird interaction where poor network on desktop caused a ton of contact syncs to go out. Thanks!