Background Battery Drain.

dsc66

After leaving to charge for a while, rolling into the next hour and disconnecting charger , a couple of screen shots.... first showing nothing is running (except the settings screen).
Second showing StageTrax still "running" something.

peter

Send me the log files via Settings > Create Support Email and then close the app in the task switcher.

dsc66

peter Thanks Peter, Log sent. As additional info, during the 10-11.00 period in the above photo , Stage Trax (although not running) continued to drain finally showing 47% (Settings 39%, Home & Lock 13% and Find My 1%). In the following hour Stage Trax only showed 1% and battery drain was now pretty much stopped, and from 12:00-13:00 the StageTrax had disappeared from the list of background apps and no more battery drain.

Also, after creating the support email - the 'missing' audio track I mentioned had finished synching.

peter

I looked at the files and Stage Traxx never receives a notification from iOS that it has been moved to the background. So it does not stop anything. I can not say what the cause might be.

In any case, you could just quit the app in the task switcher at the end of the day. That will take care of this issue every time.

dsc66

peter . Thanks for looking.

Just to state:
"In any case, you could just quit the app in the task switcher at the end of the day. That will take care of this issue every time."

That's the problem, the app wasn't available in task switcher for me to terminate. To me it wasn't running as I had closed it at the end of the day. This morning in the Task Switcher the only app running was Safari which I had just launched, however Settings/Battery continued to show StageTrax draining battery.

peter

This looks more like a bug in iOS to me then. If iOS does not show you the app in the task switcher even if it is still running, then something in iOS must not be right.

dsc66

I did some more testing yesterday. I am not an app developer, so these are just personal observations, but I am convinced it is do with icloud synch.

If StageTrax is NOT running on my ipad, and I have The Files App open on the ipad and watch the StageTrax folder, Changing an audio track between TestA and TestB on my Mac, I see after a few moments the folder on the ipad is updated. Mostly immediately, but occasionaly there is a delay. I guess as a developer you register StageTrax App as a Sync Object with Apple Services and leave it to Apple. I guess when a synch happens, although Apple deals with it, it registers the synch process to the registered app, in this case StageTrax. So irrespective of StageTrax running or not, background iCloud synching continues.

The last three occasions when I have had the battery drain issue, i am know I was updating audio tracks on my Mac.

Funnily enough, exactly the same thing happened again last night as well. I picked my ipad up this morning to find I only had 30% battery. Again StageTrax is logged as the culprit running 100% battery usage every hour from midnight until 8 this morning, but again StageTrax was not active, I closed it last night.

For me, i am considering disabling icloud sync. Damn - it’s so useful. :-).

Anyway, thanks again for looking. I am sure it’s especially annoying when something happens in a process outside of your direct control.

peter

You are right. iCloud sends a notification to your device whenever something in the cloud database changes. But my understanding was that this will not wake an inactive app. It will only cause an active app to fetch the changes from the iCloud. And that is what I have observed on my devices.

But I have just made a change in Stage Traxx on my Macbook while on the iPad Stage Traxx is not running. I will check in a couple of hours if Stage Traxx will turn up on the the energy usage page.

dsc66

peter :-) I did exactly the same this morning. We can compare. :-)

dsc66

I could upload the photos if you want, but what I found was:

My iPad was not running Stage Trax.
I modified a file on. my Mac.

I checked a few times during the hour.... I could see Battery Drain reporting StageTrax using power for 39 minutes and later 49 minutes and at the end of the hour Stage Trax accounting for 99% of my battery consumption. I will add it's not huge amounts of battery drain, but over a night it adds up to some 50% battery drain for my ageing iPad.

I then loaded Stage Trax, I went straight to settings and could see last synch approximately 1 hour ago, and after a few moment the sync updated to now.

My guess, IOS is constantly trying to wake StageTrax to complete the sync, but does not succeed because Stage Trax is not running, but logs the drain to StageTrax regardless.
I would also guess, that when I tried to force this a few weeks ago (see post June 20th) I failed to create the problem because I had ensured the Sync was successful by forcing the sync in StageTrax. It hadn't occurred to me to not run StageTrax at that time. :-)

peter

I have no battery drain whatsoever from Stage Traxx in the last 5 hours. But I have an idea: Please check iOS Settings > General > Background App Refresh. This is the first setting I disable on any Apple device I have. I guess you have it enabled. If you don't need it, disable it completely or at least for Stage Traxx 3.

I will have to find some information about how background app refresh and iCloud Sync are interacting with each other. Maybe I am doing something wrong in the app when background app refresh kicks in.

dsc66

peter
I have a bit more info:

After this mornings results, I went for the good old power off/on.
Before I stated that if I had the FILES app open on the StageTrax folder on my iPad, I could see the file updated on the iPad if I changed an audio file on my Mac. Remember StageTrax is not running on the iPad. This file update was happening pretty much instantly.

Since the iPad reboot, the behaviour is different.

On the iPad I have tried StageTrax Active foreground, StageTrax in background and StageTrax not running.

I make a change on the MAC, and the iPad continues to show the old file for roughly 8-10 minutes before the change is reflected on the iPad. Before it was almost instant. Every 10 mins or so would be hardly noticeable as a power drain and would reflect what was happening normally. As I said before, it was an occasional problem.

BUT under some circumstance, it would appear that something goes wrong and iCloud sync gets stuck running as background task constantly draining power rather than kicking in every 10 minutes or so.

Finally, I tried StageTrax not running and Background App Refresh disabled in iOS Settings > General > Background App Refresh.
I waited, watching for 30 minutes and nothing happened, so I guess No Background App Refresh = No Sync if the APP is not running.

I then launched StageTrax and within a few seconds, the file update occurred.

For completion, I also tested StageTrax in background, still with App refresh disabled. In this scenario , the files updated after 10 minutes or so.

So great, DISABLE BACKGROUND APP REFRESH is a solution that should work if the app is not running.

Yes, if I forget to close the app, I assume there is a small risk that the sync problem could re-occur but that is better than having no control at all.

Thank you for your time.

« Previous Page