Battery Drain while GPS Tracking

[Dotzo Dotzov]

In version 6.0.2 I am experiencing extraordinarily higher battery usage than in previous versions. With GPS tracking ON, Geopaparazzi 6.0.2 uses almost 25% battery per hour, compared to <5% in version 5.6.4 on the same device and with all other settings and environment identical. This is both with screen on and off and application in Active and Background use.

My device is Samsung Galaxy S9+ with Exynos (SM-G965F), Android 9. Battery Optimization is ON.

On another device (Xiaomi), version Geopaparazzi 6.0.2 consumes approximately 5% per hour while tracking, which I believe is the normal usage. So there must something between the new version of Geopaparazzi and Samsung?

Can anyone suggest an explanation and solution?

[andrea antonello]

Hi Dotzo,

In version 6.0.2 I am experiencing extraordinarily higher battery usage than in previous versions. With GPS tracking ON, Geopaparazzi 6.0.2 uses almost 25% battery per hour, compared to <5% in version 5.6.4 on the same device and with all other settings and environment identical. This is both with screen on and off and application in Active and Background use.

that is odd. I would expect this to happen with the screen on, because of all the new 3D goodies, but not with battery off.

In fact I also didn't experience this high battery drain on my devices (but they are not Samsung).

 

My device is Samsung Galaxy S9+ with Exynos (SM-G965F), Android 9. Battery Optimization is ON.

On another device (Xiaomi), version Geopaparazzi 6.0.2 consumes approximately 5% per hour while tracking, which I believe is the normal usage. So there must something between the new version of Geopaparazzi and Samsung?

Can anyone suggest an explanation and solution?

I will have to ask help from other Samsung users of the list. I think my colleague Silvia has a Samsung S7 (not sure about the number) and she sure isn't experiencing that drainage, she would have said, being a battery maniac :-).

Anyone using Samsung devices experiencing the same issue? 

Cheers,

Andrea

 

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[Dotzo Dotzov]

Hi Andrea, thank you for looking into my issue. In the last couple of days I ran some more tests, re-installed and installed again all versions to see if I can solve the problem, but no success. The summary is:

1. Geopaparazzi 5.6.4 - approx. 4% of battery per hour.

2. SMASH - approx. 5% battery per hour (I keep the tracking active by keeping GPS Status open on the screen, even with the screen off. This way the GPS stays active and SMASH keeps tracking).

3. Geopaparazzi 6.0.2 >25% battery per hour and the device heats up.

All above have the Battery Optimization ON, but none runs in Background mode anyway.

One more question - I have a mapurl to load Google Hybrid images, which works fine in version 5.6.4, but I can't make it work in version 6.0.2. What am I doing wrong? The file is attached.

неделя, 12 януари 2020 г., 18:38:57 UTC+11, moovida написа:

Hi Dotzo,

In version 6.0.2 I am experiencing extraordinarily higher battery usage than in previous versions. With GPS tracking ON, Geopaparazzi 6.0.2 uses almost 25% battery per hour, compared to <5% in version 5.6.4 on the same device and with all other settings and environment identical. This is both with screen on and off and application in Active and Background use.

that is odd. I would expect this to happen with the screen on, because of all the new 3D goodies, but not with battery off.

In fact I also didn't experience this high battery drain on my devices (but they are not Samsung).

 

My device is Samsung Galaxy S9+ with Exynos (SM-G965F), Android 9. Battery Optimization is ON.

On another device (Xiaomi), version Geopaparazzi 6.0.2 consumes approximately 5% per hour while tracking, which I believe is the normal usage. So there must something between the new version of Geopaparazzi and Samsung?

Can anyone suggest an explanation and solution?

I will have to ask help from other Samsung users of the list. I think my colleague Silvia has a Samsung S7 (not sure about the number) and she sure isn't experiencing that drainage, she would have said, being a battery maniac :-).

Anyone using Samsung devices experiencing the same issue? 

Cheers,

Andrea

 

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[andrea antonello]

Hi Dotzo,

Hi Andrea, thank you for looking into my issue. In the last couple of days I ran some more tests, re-installed and installed again all versions to see if I can solve the problem, but no success. The summary is:

1. Geopaparazzi 5.6.4 - approx. 4% of battery per hour.

2. SMASH - approx. 5% battery per hour (I keep the tracking active by keeping GPS Status open on the screen, even with the screen off. This way the GPS stays active and SMASH keeps tracking).

I almost can't believe what you write!! We are currently working a lot on the new first official SMASH release that will have lots of nice features... and GPS background logging was bothering me a lot, since it is very hard to achieve in the programming language used for it. 

I will try your gps status trick later. If that one works, you are officially today's geopaparazzi hero (for me at least :-)).

 

3. Geopaparazzi 6.0.2 >25% battery per hour and the device heats up.

All above have the Battery Optimization ON, but none runs in Background mode anyway.

thanks a ton for these statistics. I honestly wasn't aware of this huge difference, even with the screen off. With the screen off the whole rendering part should not be active and I would not expect that high differences.

One more question - I have a mapurl to load Google Hybrid images, which works fine in version 5.6.4, but I can't make it work in version 6.0.2. What am I doing wrong? The file is attached.

I just looked into it. It was a small and stupid bug. :-( It is fixed already and I can see your mapurl, but you will have to wait for the next release I am afraid. 

Thanks,

Andrea

 

неделя, 12 януари 2020 г., 18:38:57 UTC+11, moovida написа:

Hi Dotzo,

In version 6.0.2 I am experiencing extraordinarily higher battery usage than in previous versions. With GPS tracking ON, Geopaparazzi 6.0.2 uses almost 25% battery per hour, compared to <5% in version 5.6.4 on the same device and with all other settings and environment identical. This is both with screen on and off and application in Active and Background use.

that is odd. I would expect this to happen with the screen on, because of all the new 3D goodies, but not with battery off.

In fact I also didn't experience this high battery drain on my devices (but they are not Samsung).

 

My device is Samsung Galaxy S9+ with Exynos (SM-G965F), Android 9. Battery Optimization is ON.

On another device (Xiaomi), version Geopaparazzi 6.0.2 consumes approximately 5% per hour while tracking, which I believe is the normal usage. So there must something between the new version of Geopaparazzi and Samsung?

Can anyone suggest an explanation and solution?

I will have to ask help from other Samsung users of the list. I think my colleague Silvia has a Samsung S7 (not sure about the number) and she sure isn't experiencing that drainage, she would have said, being a battery maniac :-).

Anyone using Samsung devices experiencing the same issue? 

Cheers,

Andrea

 

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[Dotzo Dotzov]

Hi again Andrea,

I have an update on the high battery usage during GPS tracking in version 6.0.2. My Galaxy S9+ received Android 10 and I decided to install the latest Geopaparazzi again to check if this will make difference. Unfortunately the behaviour is exactly the same as before.

But I kept trying various scenarios and discovered how it works. As mentioned before, with GPS tracking on, version 6.0.2 consumes >25% battery per hour and the device heats up. This is when the app is minimized and the device screen is off. One important detail is that this is when I minimize the app from the map screen. When the GPS tracking is active and the app is minimized, but from the Dashboard screen (NOT the Map screen) the app consumes around 5% battery per hour - just like the old version and most of the other similar apps I'm testing. And the device does not heat up.

So your suggestion about the rendering part of the app seems to be correct, with the detail that it becomes inactive only when you exit the map screen. If the app is minimized from the map screen, all this seems to remain active and drains the battery.

Although this probably should be written in a separate thread, I have a question about geopackage. I created one to test, with a couple vector layers and one raster. The vectors display fine. I can bring the raster in the layers list from the geopackage, but for some reason it simply wouldn't display on the map. This is a geotiff and I imported it in the geopackage using QGIS, with the correct projection as per the manual. And in QGIS it shows up fine. Any idea?

Regards,

Dotzo

PS. When do you think the next release will be out?

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[andrea antonello]

Hi Dotzo,

[...]

> But I kept trying various scenarios and discovered how it works. As mentioned before, with GPS tracking on, version 6.0.2 consumes >25%
> battery per hour and the device heats up. This is when the app is minimized and the device screen is off. One important detail is that this is when I
> minimize the app from the map screen. When the GPS tracking is active and the app is minimized, but from the Dashboard screen (NOT the Map
> screen) the app consumes around 5% battery per hour - just like the old version and most of the other similar apps I'm testing. And the device
> does not heat up.
>
> So your suggestion about the rendering part of the app seems to be correct, with the detail that it becomes inactive only when you exit the map
> screen. If the app is minimized from the map screen, all this seems to remain active and drains the battery.

what you are writing (and thanks a ton for this kind of testing) makes
me think of a bug. I will sure look into this and keep track of the
findings here: https://github.com/geopaparazzi/geopaparazzi/issues/648

> Although this probably should be written in a separate thread, I have a question about geopackage. I created one to test, with a couple vector
> layers and one raster. The vectors display fine. I can bring the raster in the layers list from the geopackage, but for some reason it simply wouldn't
> display on the map. This is a geotiff and I imported it in the geopackage using QGIS, with the correct projection as per the manual. And in QGIS it
> shows up fine. Any idea?

Could you send me the geopackage? I would need to test it in debug
mode to understand what is going on.

One thing I figured when testing tilesets done with gdal, is that gdal
generates only the "best fit" zoomlevel and not anything above and
below. One would need to make manually the overviews and even then it
would create only lower zoomlevels.
It might be possible that QGIS uses directly gdal in default mode and
therefore only one level is created. In that case if you don't set
that zoomlevel, you wouldn't see anything.

> PS. When do you think the next release will be out?

To be honest, right now we have no schedule for it.
We are very busy with getting the first release of SMASH out and do
not have resources to also push new features in geopap in this moment.

If we fix the above battery draining bug I will sure make one very
very soon. But otherwise our focus is to get out SMASH.

Did you have any particular feature/reason for e new release?

Thanks for your help, I might be in need to ask you to test the bugfix
(if I can bring it up) using a test release, I hope you would be up
for it.

Cheers,
Andrea

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