[03/25/13] A Governor a Day - HTC Rezound

Today I'm launching this not-so-little experiment of mine.
Purpeltendire said:
Now that I've familiarized myself with much of the Rezound forum, I was wondering how I could begin contributing in my own way. I don't have much skill in the way of development, and with school I doubt I'd have the time. But then another thought came to mind... guinea pig!
A Governor a Day
So basically what I'm planning on doing is testing the effects of the various CPU governors. I was planning on doing this for myself anyways, as I'm very curious what the practical differences are between governors.
I'll be setting several constants (Min/Max frequencies, voltages, ROM/Kernel, etc) and the only variable (at first) will be the governor. I'll probably start off with a one day time period, just because of the simplicity. Overall routine will be to set the governor when I plug my phone in, either at night before I go to bed or just before I run out of juice -- say 10% mark. And then just use it as I always do, because I have the benefit of a fairly regular class schedule there shouldn't be any significant changes to my usage pattern.
I'll be using several apps to help document all this data; if you want to suggest another to add to the accuracy and range of the stats, feel free. So far the list is:
Statistics
GSam Battery Monitor.
SystemPanel [Paid].
CPU Spy.
BetterBatteryStats (Added 02/29/13)
Settings
Kernel Tuner
Android Tuner Free
I'm guessing that for the first week or so I'll be taking community feedback from you all and incorporating it into the OP as constants and such, so the final experiment probably won't start for another few days and I'll have to redo my first few days of statistics. But that really doesn't bother me.
This is sort of my introductory post, I'm almost done with my day on DanceDance. As I told some people in the Infection2.1 thread I'd be making a very detailed post of my battery life and settings, I'll also be copying that post into a new thread and reserving the first few posts for myself. You're all welcome to make suggestions in both this thread and the dedicated thread, but let's try to keep Neo's ROM thread clean for him.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm thinking of starting with the more popular governors first. It seems as if Wheatley and DanceDance are both very popular and also very similar, so that might be an ideal starting point for my first two days. Thoughts, and are there any apps you would like to see me use to record data?

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Using this post to display the most current governor post.
Purpeltendire said:
Intellidemand redo!
First off, pay less attention to the BetterBatteryStats stuff. I had a weird usage pattern today... used it normally until about 9 PST, then had a mild crisis to deal with over GTalk until like now. So non-stop typing for a solid hour and a half kind of ruined the battery usage percentage... it was way lower earlier.
I'm also glad to be redoing this now that Intellidemand has been getting so much attention in Infection 2.3 and Hiro as a very good governor.
Intellidemand Redo 1
Intellidemand Redo 2
Intellidemand Redo 3
Great governor. I think this can give Wheatley a run for its money. From memory, my usage up until my typing storm was around 2 hours screen on time, and 3.9% battery usage. That's truly fantastic. I ended with a pretty high hourly percentage, BUT! I also ended with nearly 3 hours of screen-on time. For many people that's not only high, it can't be done. So all the more amazing because of it.
Performance wise, this is a very close runner to OnDemand. Little lag unless you go out of your way to look for it, and good scaling too.
Final conclusion is that this is a capable all-rounder, and it supports tweaking so you can go even further to customize it to your needs. I highly recommend you do so.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

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Links to individual governor writeups, as the thread is a bit of a mess.
Wheatley
DanceDance
Intellidemand
Ondemand
Lionheart
SmartassV2
Lulzactive
Scary
Interactive
Lazy
Badass
SavageZen
Skywalker
Conservative
Performance
Comparison: Wheatley v. DanceDance v. SmartassV2

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Re: A Governor a Day
Sounds legit man good luck can't wait to see results.
What is your usage like? How much screen on time are you looking to get?
I'd like to see android tuner used to set governors it also has a nice battery stats portion of the app.
Sent from my ADR6425LVW using xda app-developers app

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Re: A Governor a Day
Squirrel1620 said:
Sounds legit man good luck can't wait to see results.
What is your usage like? How much screen on time are you looking to get?
I'd like to see android tuner used to set governors it also has a nice battery stats portion of the app.
Sent from my ADR6425LVW using xda app-developers app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I usually have between 1.5 to 2 hours of screen-on time. If I do a lot of document editing away from home it might be closer to 2.5, but that's on the long side for me.
When I used Android Tuner within Ecliptic, I wasn't really fond of its interface. But I'll take a look again, at the least I could use the battery stats from it.
Edit: Spent about 15 minutes digging through the settings in the free version of Android Tuner. Unfortunately it looks like a lot of the battery and statistic recording is only on the paid version of the app, or else takes up almost double the resources of GSam and SystemPanel together. Plus I really don't feel like paying $10 for an app I don't like. But take a look at everything when I post in the OP later, hopefully most if not all of the data you're looking for will be in there from either GSam or SystemPanel.
Sent from my Infected Rezound.

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I ran the Wheatley governor today, CPU Min at 192 MHz and max at 1350. I undervolted another -50mV from standard Infected, so it's 100mV below stock. The second CPU core was disabled unless needed, and was running the OnDemand governor.
The phone spent as much time at 1350Mhz as it spent with the screen on, at about 2 hours 15 minutes. Total time before I plugged the phone in to upload screenshots was at 16 hours 20 minutes, with about 27% battery left (That Battery Stats screenshot was taken after I had it plugged in for a couple minutes, sorry). According to GSam, the screen took about 49% power, apps took about 45%, and Wifi/Radios took about 5.6% together.
The biggest battery hogging app was Apex Launcher by a long shot, at 17%.
Most of the stats you can see just by looking through the screenshots, I had to upload them to dropbox because they're too large to include in the post and XDA attachments downsizes them far too much.
If you have any other questions or want to see additional stats that I didn't include, feel free to ask in this thread (link in my signature). I'll be doing this sort of thing daily with different governors as a sort of real-world experiment, so if you have any suggestions please let me know. Suggestions on everything from how I should set the kernel or governor up, to applications I should use to track usage, everything is welcome.
Screens! (Click to zoom if you need to)
Wheatley End 1
Wheatley End 2
Wheatley End 3

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Yesterday when I was running Wheatley, I took some screenshots when the battery hit 50%, but I didn't end up using them in the final post. Now that I'm on DanceDance today, I did the same thing to see if there were differences. I didn't expect many, because lots of people say that these two governors are very similar.
DanceDance at 50%
Wheatley at 50%
I must say, I was surprised. So far I'm getting about an hour less battery life than yesterday. The differences in screen on time are minimal, about seven minutes, but the screen is using about 2 percent more power on DanceDance. Applications are also using more power, by about 3%. Somehow this is all adding up to about an hour less battery... which might be considerable to some.

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Man.. I'm talking to myself here. Oh well. At least I'm good company! :highfive:
Alright, DanceDance. I'll link the screenshots, and then do my writeup.
DanceDance 1
DanceDance 2
DanceDance 3
Right off the bat, according to CPU Spy the phone spent a little more time at various intermediate clocks than in Wheatley. However, this may have been due to the fact that when on Wheatley I had CPU1 set to OnDemand and not Wheatley like CPU0 was. Thanks for the catch, brenuga;
brenuga said:
I think the reason the cpu spent so much time at 1350 is because your cpu1 governor is set to ondemand. I would change it to wheatley or Intellidemand.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'll have to come back to Wheatley on both CPUs sometime soon.
Moving on to GSam. Phone Radio, Screen on, Wifi, and Wake time all look pretty similar if you compare them to the Wheatley screenshots; everything was within about 30 minutes of each other, which makes sense because I took the DanceDance screenshots 30 minutes earlier in the evening than the Wheatley ones. However, in Wheatley, the screen used more power than the apps, while in DanceDance the apps were using slightly more power than the screen. I'm not sure if this was due to my usage or not...
App usage were largely the same as well.
SystemPanel offers a bit more insight. The Battery and Device Usage plots on Wheatley and DanceDance were very close to each other, sharing the same shape and general line. However the lowest graph (which has its label cut off, sorry. It's CPU Usage!) tells a different story. Wheatley appears to have a significantly lower CPU Usage average, at times appearing to be by as much as ~20%.
These two governors are very very similar, as you'll read time and time again in these forums. But sometimes it's not about stats... sometimes it's about how your device feels. That's where DanceDance really wins in this comparison. To me, it feels a fair bit smoother and more fluid -- more Buttery, I suppose. This does come at a cost though; while your screen is on, you can practically watch the battery meter drop. It's a lot more exciting than watching paint dry... fair bit of action here haha. Wheatley didn't seem to have the same kind of battery drop while using applications as DanceDance did. However it seemed to make up for it, with CPU Usage appearing to fall to lower thresholds than in Wheatley at one or two points.
TL;DR: DanceDance felt a little better from a smoothness standpoint, while Wheatley seemed to be a bit better at conserving battery with screen on. I think that they're so close though that DanceDance is the better choice. Who doesn't like smooth?

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Thank you for the review! I like.

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Pretty cool idea. Keep it up.

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Re: A Governor a Day
I'll make a thread in the general (non device specific) to try and get more attention here. I think a lot of people would like to see these results
Here is the thread in general discussion
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2171844
Oh and may I request intellidemand? I've always used it. Thank you
Sent from my ADR6425LVW using xda app-developers app

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Awesome! Great idea.
Now do Lionheart!

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Squirrel1620 said:
I'll make a thread in the general (non device specific) to try and get more attention here. I think a lot of people would like to see these results
Here is the thread in general discussion
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2171844
Oh and may I request intellidemand? I've always used it. Thank you
Sent from my ADR6425LVW using xda app-developers app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Appreciate that man, thanks.
You're in luck! I'm actually doing Intellidemand today, and then OnDemand tomorrow.
chupajr said:
Awesome! Great idea.
Now do Lionheart!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Recommend me an AOSP kernel with Lionheart enabled, and I'd be more than happy to. Snuzzo's Funky doesn't have it.

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Halfway through Intellidemand day, and I'll compare it with DanceDance because that's the most recent one.
Intellidemand at 50%
DanceDance at 50%
Through the day I've noticed battery life is considerably worse than either DanceDance or Wheatley. DanceDance took almost 1.5 hours longer to drain to 50%. The screen is taking about 11% more power than in DanceDance, even though it's been on for 15 minutes less. I'm fairly sure my brightness settings have been about the same (Auto in daylight, set level around 20% indoors).
Full write up will come tonight.

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Re: A Governor a Day
Purpeltendire said:
Recommend me an AOSP kernel with Lionheart enabled, and I'd be more than happy to. Snuzzo's Funky doesn't have it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mine has it (Ermahgerd), and at least one (maybe both) of iHateWebOS's has it.
Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk 2

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shrike1978 said:
Mine has it (Ermahgerd), and at least one (maybe both) of iHateWebOS's has it.
Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk 2
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Alright, thanks. I'll have to give your kernel and iHate's Deluxe a try when I finish up with the governors in Snuzzo's,
Without further ado, here's Intellidemand as requested. [Now with BetterBatteryStats!]
Intellidemand End 1
Intellidemand End 2
Intellidemand End 3
The governor seemed to be decent at scaling, keeping the CPU spread out more than either DanceDance or Wheatley. Still between one and five minutes spent at the more popular clocks, with the majority of the time logged at 1350, 192, and Deep Sleep as usual. Nothing major to report here, pretty standard for what I've seen so far.
GSam has something different to say. For one, battery life seemed strained. There was considerably more usage at idle or deep sleep than either DanceDance or Wheatley. I watched a movie at one point this evening, and when I checked my phone again it had dropped 6% over 2.5 hours, without touching it once. It also ramped up quickly while browsing, I think in the time it took me to make a 2 sentence post the battery dropped 6 or 7%. That didn't happen with the others. The battery discharge graph is pretty steep, which makes sense given the increased discharge.
Also, app usage seemed abnormally high. I checked on that and found that the Android OS/Kernel was using a LOT of power: 65%. Yesterday on DanceDance it was using 6%... there's something weird here.
If someone running Intellidemand (Squirrel1620?) could run GSam for a day and see if this happens to you, that would be great. I'd like to see if this is a random event or something consistent with the governor.
SystemPanel reports similar findings under "System Processes" with 43% of my total CPU usage. But quite frankly, other than that there's nothing really weird going on. No wakelocks, no apps freezing... it just seems like the OS wasn't idle for some reason.
My verdict: Not a governor for idle users, partly because it's based off the GPU. If you do gaming or use apps that require a bit more graphical power, then by all means go for it. But for users like me, who text, browse the web a bit, and do some forum work, this governor has very little to offer except minimal noticed lag.
Tomorrow [Saturday] I'll do OnDemand, and Sunday I'll pick another kernel to flash so I can do Lionheart on Monday.

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Re: A Governor a Day
Purpeltendire said:
Alright, thanks. I'll have to give your kernel and iHate's Deluxe a try when I finish up with the governors in Snuzzo's,
Without further ado, here's Intellidemand as requested. [Now with BetterBatteryStats!]
Intellidemand End 1
Intellidemand End 2
Intellidemand End 3
The governor seemed to be decent at scaling, keeping the CPU spread out more than either DanceDance or Wheatley. Still between one and five minutes spent at the more popular clocks, with the majority of the time logged at 1350, 192, and Deep Sleep as usual. Nothing major to report here, pretty standard for what I've seen so far.
GSam has something different to say. For one, battery life seemed strained. There was considerably more usage at idle or deep sleep than either DanceDance or Wheatley. I watched a movie at one point this evening, and when I checked my phone again it had dropped 6% over 2.5 hours, without touching it once. It also ramped up quickly while browsing, I think in the time it took me to make a 2 sentence post the battery dropped 6 or 7%. That didn't happen with the others. The battery discharge graph is pretty steep, which makes sense given the increased discharge.
Also, app usage seemed abnormally high. I checked on that and found that the Android OS/Kernel was using a LOT of power: 65%. Yesterday on DanceDance it was using 6%... there's something weird here.
If someone running Intellidemand (Squirrel1620?) could run GSam for a day and see if this happens to you, that would be great. I'd like to see if this is a random event or something consistent with the governor.
SystemPanel reports similar findings under "System Processes" with 43% of my total CPU usage. But quite frankly, other than that there's nothing really weird going on. No wakelocks, no apps freezing... it just seems like the OS wasn't idle for some reason.
My verdict: Not a governor for idle users, partly because it's based off the GPU. If you do gaming or use apps that require a bit more graphical power, then by all means go for it. But for users like me, who text, browse the web a bit, and do some forum work, this governor has very little to offer except minimal noticed lag.
Tomorrow [Saturday] I'll do OnDemand, and Sunday I'll pick another kernel to flash so I can do Lionheart on Monday.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'll run intellidemand on lunar kernel with EclipticRez. Starting off at 100% and ill post gsam when it gets to about 14
Sent from my ADR6425LVW using xda app-developers app

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Re: A Governor a Day
Thanks for your testing info. Battery and performance are important to me which I'm sure is much like others. Great reviews so far
Sent from my ADR6425LVW using xda app-developers app

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Squirrel1620 said:
I'll run intellidemand on lunar kernel with EclipticRez. Starting off at 100% and ill post gsam when it gets to about 14
Sent from my ADR6425LVW using xda app-developers app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks, I appreciate it.
Jwezesa said:
Thanks for your testing info. Battery and performance are important to me which I'm sure is much like others. Great reviews so far
Sent from my ADR6425LVW using xda app-developers app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you. Anything in particular you'd like to see?
EDIT: Phone decided to shut itself off while I wasn't paying attention, so the stats were all reset. No results today unfortunately.

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Re: A Governor a Day
Ok so this was intellidemand underclocked 1.35 ghz normal usage mostly 3g/wifi
Sent from my ADR6425LVW using xda app-developers app