Galaxy S4 battery draining after NG6 update

[timothyc74]

Went to Samsung center at Best Buy 2 days ago. Had the tech push the update to my phone again and re-install it. I had hoped to see an improvement but did not. I experienced approximately the same drain from normal weekday use down to a range of 60-40% remaining in a five hour span. Before update that would be 70-60% remaining. This evening the Android OS was again running away with battery usage. My brother tells me that the lollipop update on his Verizon S5 is causing the same.

[Fruity_Pebbles]

@kn0ck 's discussion about CompCache makes perfect sense to me.  I hope someone from Verizon or Samsung is paying attention.

[JGwiz]

The real problem here is that Samsung, and Verizon, take a perfectly good operating system and modify it extensively to create their own "user experience." 

20-some pages of complaints on this one thread underscores the reality that once loaded up with all the useless bloatware/crapware, neither Samsun nor Verizon really have a clue as to what is causing these problems.

I have two Nexus tablets running stock Android and never...I repeat, never, experience any of these problems.  That should tell us all something, shouldn't it?

Personally, I will not take an update until several months after it becomes available, simply so that I can learn from those who have taken the update and what problems they are experiencing.  I'm still running the NC5 release of 4.2.2.  While battery life isn't great, it's much better than what the newer release provides.

There are ways to freeze the SDM app which manages OTA updates so that you can prevent these automatic, and unwelcomed updates.  Do a search, especially on a site like XDA-Developers.  There is a wealth of information from very knowledgeable people.

It's a pity that users must resort to such workarounds in order to have a functional phone...isn't it?

[Fruity_Pebbles]

I think @kn0ck has it nailed with the CompCache theory.  My phone went into rapid battery drain mode again this weekend.  I launched Terminal Emulator and ran "top -m 10 -n 1", and saw that krtccd was chewing up a large amount of CPU time.  Then I brought up the recent apps list and closed several apps - my thought being that closing apps would free up memory and thus take away the reason that CompCache was busy.  Back to Terminal Emulator, and now top showed that krtccd was inactive.  Battery drain was back to normal level also.

To me this confirms that CompCache is the culprit.

Verizon, please get Samsung to fix this!

[anotherhaus]

Honestly, I think there is zero chance that between Google, Samsung, and Verizon, this is ever going to get fixed. Our phones are nearing the end of their support life (if they aren't EOL already?). This group should turn attention to finding a way to mitigate this automatically. Tasker has the ability to create standalone apps (I don't know if they can be installed on other people's devices though) - maybe someone could create a monitoring program that would watch for krtccd using high CPU for an extended period of time and then somehow deal with it, whether it's popping up a notification to warn the user or something more significant like stopping programs (a little riskier, if they're in the middle of something). Maybe a series of warnings followed by an automatic reboot if they aren't dismissed within a certain time period, so that in-pocket battery drain can be minimized.

[jrh4054]

JGwiz,

Interesting that you mentioned your Nexus tablets.  I have the Nexus 7 (2012).  When it was updated to Lollipop, it became virtually useless.  It was so very slow, apps froze or quit without warning, it locked up entirely, restarted on its own, and on and on.  I did all the standard stuff like the FDR, cleared cache, etc., but nothing helped.   Neither Asus or Google would do anything to help.  Sound familiar to the NG6 situation?  From the Google community, I found that I was one of many having similar issues.  Why do these companies insist on fixing stuff that isn't broken?

[kn0ck]

@Fruity_Pebbles Interestingly, I caught krtccd chewing CPU again at 4% battery left.  Held the front button, and then swiped everything but Terminal Emulator away, and now krtccd is taking 0%.

[szurlo]

My experience has been slightly different.  I have experimented with this extensively and for me, even if I swipe away ALL the listed applications one at a time, CPU usage is still very high.  However, if I select "Close All", that fixes it every time. Like something is still running that is hidden from that view but can be stopped using "Close All".  That's how I deal with this issue now rather than rebooting.

[szurlo]

I tried the same test while my phone was hot and the battery was plummeting. Got the same result. krtccd is the offending process.

[Snn5]

Its related to RUNTIME_COMPCACHE (/drivers/staging/android/rtcc.c)

Whatever that is.