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I know there are already a lot of threads about suggestions on how to improve performance and, strongly related, save battery life on your android. I also have tried most of the tools to diagnose problems (eg. WatchDog).

Problem is, my brand new HTC Desire HD will often be snappy and responsive, sometime get a few slow downs, and not-so-rarely start being completely unresponsive, as bad as my previous iPhone 3G which I gave away for exactly that reason. Also, battery would last less than 24hours even with extremely little use of the display (a huge battery drainer indeed), with background-data and auto-sync on, without GPS and with half of the time WiFi connection and for the rest WiFi off.

WatchDog is usually not seeing anything weird. No process seems taking a huge hit on the CPU even when the phone is acting slowly; just today I got a first warning - HTC Sense Background 99.9%.

So I would like to go a bit deeper in my debug. I /could/ uninstall all applications I installed, but I'd rather understand what is really causing the problem.

So this is the real question: how can I better debug what's going on inside my Android?

Does anybody have some tutorial/tools/suggestions?

I guess going with adb from my PC might provide more information, any hint/feedback?

Some additional information after feedback from DarthNoodles... NB. I'm not putting it here to 'debug' my own phone on this forum, just to provide comparison information!

standard Battery Consumption info

If i've been using the phone, i get 'Display' to take most of the battery usage - ~60% on average (is that too much?).

If not, it's 'Android OS' which takes on average about 60%, and 'Android System' usually about 10-15%

There usually is no installed application appearing there

hidden debug

hey that's great! I might not have yet learned about everything but i'll try to write down what I see...

Since it has a graphical, not numerical display I'll rate '100' the first, longest bar and make an estimation of the other ones.

CPU usage

(for all time of timing a get a similar distribution)

  • 'init' has a HUGE blue+red bar; Android System comes 2nd with a tiny 1px blue bar

Partial wake usage

Total Time

  • 'HTC Sense' 100 blue bar
  • 'Android System' 30 blue bar
  • less for the rest

Since last unplugged

  • 'Android System' 100 blue bar
  • 'HTC Sense' 30 blue bar
  • 'Mail' 5 blue bar
  • ...
  • 'UID 10013' 'partial Wakelock' ~2 blue bar!

Other Usage

Total all time

  • Running 35.8%
  • Screen on 11.1%
  • Phone on 0.8%
  • Wifi On 41.6%
  • Wifi Running 41.6%
  • BlueTooth On 6.6%

Since last unplugged

  • Running 37.5%
  • Screen on 3.8%
  • Phone on 1.8%
  • Wifi On 45.8%
  • Wifi Running 45.8%

I am under the impression that it's HTC Sense or some other android process that is taking my resources... but I don't really understand why yet...

WatchDog

Getting some warnings for 'com.htc.bgp' taking too much cpu (~55%)

Thanks!

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  • 1
    com.htc.bgp is a utility from HTC that seems to be responsible for syncing various accounts. I'm pretty sure it's used for "Exchange ActiveSync" and "Facebook for HTC Sense" sync. Try setting some of those accounts to not sync for a while, or sync less often or sync fewer things (I don't sync my news feed for instance) and see if it's any better.
    – DarthNoodles
    Commented Feb 1, 2011 at 15:16
  • Thanks DarthNoodles again. Indeed! So from your hint I searched a bit more and actually what fixed it was to clear cache of most of those synced apps. Quite annoying though; my experience is that as much as I am enjoying my android phone I don't think I would suggest it to a not-techy user such as my girlfriend...
    – Stefano
    Commented Feb 2, 2011 at 11:28
  • FINAL SOLUTION : at the end I 'upgraded' my rom to a custom 2.3.3 (and will definitely keep up updating this way) which both fixed performance issues and got rid of crapware from my mobile operator (SFR). Way to go! I just wish it was an easier (less hacky) thing to flash your own rom...
    – Stefano
    Commented May 4, 2011 at 12:09
  • I had an HTC Desire HD. If I didn't plug it in at night it would drain to 0% and shut off by morning.
    – Kalamane
    Commented Dec 2, 2013 at 3:53

2 Answers 2

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The adb likely won't be of much help. The apps need to have debugging enabled to be able to see their thread and relative performance I believe.

I assume you've looked at the battery usage menu in your phone. What is it telling you?

You could the hidden debug menu in your HD. It may provide more info. Open your phone dialer and dial *#*#4636#*#*. Give that a try.

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  • edited my question to answer you... to bad about adb.. lot of things in the hidden debug menu!!!
    – Stefano
    Commented Feb 1, 2011 at 14:05
  • is there any such hidden debug menu for Samsung Galaxy S?
    – Nathan Fellman
    Commented Feb 23, 2011 at 7:14
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You could make note of the time that the phone was lagging.

Then either a) go to Android market and download a logging app such aLogCat or b) download the Android SDK and use DDMS.exe in the Tools folder.

Using the logging application, you can see if something was being written to the log at the time the phone was lagging. You might be able to determine what service or application is causing the lag.

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  • thanks Bryan; unluckily the 'lagging' is totally random, can happen any moment, last a few seconds or a few minutes... This will make using the logs a bit more difficult, but I'll give give thisa try nevertheless later on.
    – Stefano
    Commented Feb 1, 2011 at 14:31
  • Maybe it will help someone, total random lagging in case of my phone was caused by badly written VoIP phone app (an old app, with bad reviews in the app store, produced by my broadband operator). It was more-less obvious that the lagging is not caused by CPU which is powerful enough in that phone, but by some system I/O (input/output) low-level stuff which is written incorrectly. Removal of the app helped immediately.
    – miroxlav
    Commented Mar 27, 2019 at 9:46

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