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Bit of a noob with all this but does Activator have a baring on the battery, and can it be uninstalled as i don't use it at all or are other apps dependent on it?
 
Am I being stupid here or shouldn't someone just tell saurik this so he can fix the battery drain issue AND we can have the latest mobilesubstrate without having to downgrade and run "old" files?

I sent him an email just now.
 
While my battery life isn't horrible, it could still be better. That being said, wouldn't this be something the MS devs would be actively working on for a future release rather than having us downgrade? Surely they know?
 
I may not have followed this thread much but does this battery drain occur to everybody that is currently running up-to-date MS or just a select few with a certain MS extensions?
 
I have the "bad" version and my battery life is fine.


Turn off push notifications and weather, those are the real killers.
 
I currently have 3228 and I can only find 3226 once I put in the new repo in cydia. Is 3226 the best version since I can't get 3209?
 
I have the "bad" version and my battery life is fine.


Turn off push notifications and weather, those are the real killers.

I can leave push, weather, wifi, and Bluetooth on in standby mode without any negative effect ;-)
 
please provide testing methodology

Am I being stupid here or shouldn't someone just tell saurik this so he can fix the battery drain issue AND we can have the latest mobilesubstrate without having to downgrade and run "old" files?

I sent him an email just now.

A) Thank you for not only telling me, but providing a link to this forum. Most users simply talk to each other, and do not report issues.

B) However, this thread is not providing any concrete numbers, or any indication of testing methodology. Meanwhile, there is disagreement among users as to what version is even causing the problem.

Let me be clear about this: MobileSubstrate doesn't actually /do/ anything. If you install just it, and you let your phone then sit there not doing anything, it will /never/ use any CPU, ever. When a program starts up it is injected into its process space, it iterates a folder to see if it should inject anything else, and that's it: if there is nothing in that folder then its involvement in that process is entirely done.

This regime is so thoroughly enforced that the engine it comes with for letting extensions modify code is actually bundled separately, and will not end up in any processes unless one of the extensions actually needs it and requests it.

It's even better than this, though: MobileSubstrate only even loaded anything at all in user space on the primary CPU. Put differently, it only affects normal boring applications. This entire CPU is simply put to sleep when the phone is on standby, and is only woken up occasionally for timers, like an alarm or a calendar event.

I have just now verified that this is the behavior I'm seeing on my device: the entire night my phone was asleep, except at 3am when it woke up to do this "provisioning profile janitor" task that Apple apparently thinks is important enough to do every day at 3am, and which I had never heard of before and am now incredibly curious about the purpose of ;P.

Therefore, it is very difficult to understand how MobileSubstrate could possibly cause whatever issue you feel you are experiencing.

Meanwhile, things people really care about, things like battery life, memory usage, and signal strength, are very difficult to measure. The reason for this is that devices that are this complex use these resources in difficult ways, and they aren't things that you can directly just count.

Like, you can't use the battery percentage indicator to do this, as there is a /large/ amount of complex math that is going on just to pretend that it has any clue how much battery you have.

Example: if you leave it charging while it is at 100%, it typically will keep charging for quite a while, as it doesn't really know it is charged fully, and will continue to trickle charge as it thinks is safe. Then, when it starts discharging, its knowledge of how charged the battery /may/ have updated, allowing it to start decreasing the battery life. However, it also may have not: it depends on how many times it has seen itself in this state.

Then there are issues that simply rebooting the phone is going to cause major changes for a lot of users. As the device is used for a while, memory in processes starts getting fragmented, which leads it to page more and more. You can restart SpringBoard, which helps some, but you really need to reboot to totally fix the problem.

For most users, the only time they reboot is when they upgrade or downgrade MobileSubstrate. Therefore, users who believe "man, my battery performance really sucks" go and do something, and then are like "wow, this helped a lot, thanks!". Unless you switch back and forth multiple times, performing a careful test each time, the data is therefore totally worthless.

Meanwhile, I happen to know that planetbeing has been doing extensive tests regarding the battery usage of ultrasn0w, as he became paranoid that he was doing something weird with the debug serial port after receiving a number of comments like this. As far as I understand, these tests have shown "no drain" (whether you are using ultrasn0w 1.0 or 1.1, btw), and as ultrasn0w uses MobileSubstrate, I can infer.

Finally, there are also comments here that make it sound like jailbreaking itself is an expected battery drain, and that downgrading MobileSubstrate is bringing users "almost" back to where they had been before jailbreaking. Jailbreaking literally changes a few bytes in the kernel, and what it does is actually /bypasses/ code; if anything, if we could measure battery life effectively, what we'd find is that jailbroken phones get infinitesimally /better/ battery life than non-jailbroken phones.

So, please: if you would like to report a battery drain issue in something, I really need you to provide your testing protocol, so we can actually analyze it and determine if it is a true cause of concern or not. When I did similar things for people claiming memory usage issues with WinterBoard, I found that there were serious issues in the "common sense" way people were trying to measure that, and was able to elucidate some the issues.
 
All I can say is.....he's a really smart guy! And taking the time to post a thoughtful reply that addresses our issue is pretty cool.
 
^^^^^
If you can't tell that's saurik, then you haven't been around.

@saurik: See my post above, which essentially agrees with your post. For me, battery issues seemed to be Signal not playing nice due to the debug planted in MS.
 
A) Thank you for not only telling me, but providing a link to this forum. Most users simply talk to each other, and do not report issues.

B) However, this thread is not providing any concrete numbers, or any indication of testing methodology. Meanwhile, there is disagreement among users as to what version is even causing the problem.

Let me be clear about this: MobileSubstrate doesn't actually /do/ anything. If you install just it, and you let your phone then sit there not doing anything, it will /never/ use any CPU, ever. When a program starts up it is injected into its process space, it iterates a folder to see if it should inject anything else, and that's it: if there is nothing in that folder then its involvement in that process is entirely done.

This regime is so thoroughly enforced that the engine it comes with for letting extensions modify code is actually bundled separately, and will not end up in any processes unless one of the extensions actually needs it and requests it.

It's even better than this, though: MobileSubstrate only even loaded anything at all in user space on the primary CPU. Put differently, it only affects normal boring applications. This entire CPU is simply put to sleep when the phone is on standby, and is only woken up occasionally for timers, like an alarm or a calendar event.

I have just now verified that this is the behavior I'm seeing on my device: the entire night my phone was asleep, except at 3am when it woke up to do this "provisioning profile janitor" task that Apple apparently thinks is important enough to do every day at 3am, and which I had never heard of before and am now incredibly curious about the purpose of ;P.

Therefore, it is very difficult to understand how MobileSubstrate could possibly cause whatever issue you feel you are experiencing.

Meanwhile, things people really care about, things like battery life, memory usage, and signal strength, are very difficult to measure. The reason for this is that devices that are this complex use these resources in difficult ways, and they aren't things that you can directly just count.

Like, you can't use the battery percentage indicator to do this, as there is a /large/ amount of complex math that is going on just to pretend that it has any clue how much battery you have.

Example: if you leave it charging while it is at 100%, it typically will keep charging for quite a while, as it doesn't really know it is charged fully, and will continue to trickle charge as it thinks is safe. Then, when it starts discharging, its knowledge of how charged the battery /may/ have updated, allowing it to start decreasing the battery life. However, it also may have not: it depends on how many times it has seen itself in this state.

Then there are issues that simply rebooting the phone is going to cause major changes for a lot of users. As the device is used for a while, memory in processes starts getting fragmented, which leads it to page more and more. You can restart SpringBoard, which helps some, but you really need to reboot to totally fix the problem.

For most users, the only time they reboot is when they upgrade or downgrade MobileSubstrate. Therefore, users who believe "man, my battery performance really sucks" go and do something, and then are like "wow, this helped a lot, thanks!". Unless you switch back and forth multiple times, performing a careful test each time, the data is therefore totally worthless.

Meanwhile, I happen to know that planetbeing has been doing extensive tests regarding the battery usage of ultrasn0w, as he became paranoid that he was doing something weird with the debug serial port after receiving a number of comments like this. As far as I understand, these tests have shown "no drain" (whether you are using ultrasn0w 1.0 or 1.1, btw), and as ultrasn0w uses MobileSubstrate, I can infer.

Finally, there are also comments here that make it sound like jailbreaking itself is an expected battery drain, and that downgrading MobileSubstrate is bringing users "almost" back to where they had been before jailbreaking. Jailbreaking literally changes a few bytes in the kernel, and what it does is actually /bypasses/ code; if anything, if we could measure battery life effectively, what we'd find is that jailbroken phones get infinitesimally /better/ battery life than non-jailbroken phones.

So, please: if you would like to report a battery drain issue in something, I really need you to provide your testing protocol, so we can actually analyze it and determine if it is a true cause of concern or not. When I did similar things for people claiming memory usage issues with WinterBoard, I found that there were serious issues in the "common sense" way people were trying to measure that, and was able to elucidate some the issues.

Intense. While I agree that just Jailbreak doesn't affect battery life it was abundantly clear on 3.1 that Winterboard affected battery life.
 
Mine has improved since the update. I can get around 3 days give or take a few hours in stand by mode and 8-9 hours of usage time. Before that i couldn't even pass 2 days. Thanks dev-team for your hard work.
 
Wow. Saurik was here!

I had battery problem with Signal by Planetbeing. This is well known issue. Signal app stayed as background and kept eating juice of battery.
I have 100% before sleep and about 8 hrs later got 75%. It took me less than 10 min to find out on internet which Signal was the problem.
I removed Signal and my battery issue was gone. Now I am losing only 1% during sleep. This is normal.

I assume Planetbeing fixed this problem by now. The version I had was 1.3 something and now I see 1.4 on Cydia.

I didn't do anything other than removing Signal to fix battery issue. I've thought downgrading MobileSubstrate may not be the answer,
and I guess I was right since Saurik SAID SO! ;)

Peace.
 
So are people saying that version 3228 has the battery problem and we should downgrade to 3226? I tried downgrading and I lost all my apps/displays.
 
tl;dr

But are you really the Saurik?
If so, cool!

That's definitely saurik (you can tell because he used /a word/ a lot).

I've noticed that since downgrading, battery life it worse. I upgraded back to the latest version of mobile substrate and it's a bit better. iOS 4 battery life just sucks.
 
So I did this downgrade, and just noticed that all the apps that I have installed from Cydia, do not work. What I understood, or tried to in this thread, is that all the apps need to be reinstalled after this tweak. My question is, do I have to remove them then reinstall them, or can I just modify->reinstall them? I tried the modify->reinstall method, but that didnt work. Is there something I am not doing right?
 
So I did this downgrade, and just noticed that all the apps that I have installed from Cydia, do not work. What I understood, or tried to in this thread, is that all the apps need to be reinstalled after this tweak. My question is, do I have to remove them then reinstall them, or can I just modify->reinstall them? I tried the modify->reinstall method, but that didnt work. Is there something I am not doing right?

I think a 2nd reboot will fix your issue, worked for me.
 
That's definitely saurik (you can tell because he used /a word/ a lot).

I've noticed that since downgrading, battery life it worse. I upgraded back to the latest version of mobile substrate and it's a bit better. iOS 4 battery life just sucks.

That's basically what I said above (going to 3228 improves battery). So, what do you have running and what apps are installed? I found Signal really hurts battery life.

Wow. Saurik was here!

I had battery problem with Signal by Planetbeing. This is well known issue. Signal app stayed as background and kept eating juice of battery.
I have 100% before sleep and about 8 hrs later got 75%. It took me less than 10 min to find out on internet which Signal was the problem.
I removed Signal and my battery issue was gone. Now I am losing only 1% during sleep. This is normal.

I assume Planetbeing fixed this problem by now. The version I had was 1.3 something and now I see 1.4 on Cydia.

I didn't do anything other than removing Signal to fix battery issue. I've thought downgrading MobileSubstrate may not be the answer,
and I guess I was right since Saurik SAID SO! ;)

Peace.

I did the same, that is, remove Signal. It has the enablettydebug addon, which may be the source of the battery issues. It would be nice if PlanetBeing addressed whether this is an issue or not.
 
That's basically what I said above (going to 3228 improves battery). So, what do you have running and what apps are installed? I found Signal really hurts battery life.



I did the same, that is, remove Signal. It has the enablettydebug addon, which may be the source of the battery issues. It would be nice if PlanetBeing addressed whether this is an issue or not.

I've got Safari and Mail running. As for jailbroken apps, WinterBoard (which takes up a lot of system resources too, I think?), Remove Recents and Lockscreen Clock Hide.

Something tells me that all of these battery life issues on iOS 4 devices have to do with the persistent connection.
 
Is it just me or do the names "Saurik" and "Newbie" on the same line make you crack a smile??
 
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