Recently my phone started getting quite hot and the battery went from lasting all day with moderate use, ending up with about 30-40% left at the end of the day, to going down to 15% or less within about half a day. So I did some research and found that lots of people had the same problem, and not just with the SGS2 but also with the SGS3 and SGS4.
Various fixes were put forward, both from people who had solved their problem and from people who didn't appear to know what they were talking about. I tried the more sensible fixes and nothing worked.
When I checked my Battery stats in Settings, I found that the media scanner was hogging the battery and keeping the phone awake all day, so I was one step nearer solving the problem. I killed the media scanner process and my battery life improved. But each time I restarted the phone, the problem came back.
I unmounted my 32GB micro-SD card (an absolute requisite in my use case) and waited. Interestingly, the problem continued, even though that's where the vast majority of my media files reside. So I went hunting.
I noticed that even though I'd unmounted the SD card, the /storage/extSdCard folder showed that it had one item inside it. If you know about Linux file systems, which Android uses, you'll know that external storage is mounted onto an existing directory - in the case of my SD card it's mounted on /storage/extSdCard. And if the external storage is unmounted, that directory reverts to being an ordinary directory.
When I looked inside that directory using ES File Explorer, I found a folder that had been created by an app called FlickFolio. It's a great app as it allows you to look at your Flickr stream, sets, etc, on your phone or tablet, and it keeps thumbnails of all your photos on the device to make viewing them very quick.
Now, my current Flickr stream has 9,263 photos in it, taken over the last 6 years. And this directory had over 55,000 subdirectories and files in it, taking up 3.02 GB. I had no idea that they were there because when my SD card is mounted, the FlickFolio directory disappears. It's still there but the mounted SD card covers it up.
So, I deleted the FlickFolio directory. It took nearly 10 minutes for ES File Explorer to do the job but not only did I retrieve a 'missing' 3.02 GB of internal phone storage space, I found that the media scanner is now behaving, and not sucking my battery to death. And my phone isn't overheating. And I'm a happy bunny again.
same problem
garryknight said:
Recently my phone started getting quite hot and the battery went from lasting all day with moderate use, ending up with about 30-40% left at the end of the day, to going down to 15% or less within about half a day. So I did some research and found that lots of people had the same problem, and not just with the SGS2 but also with the SGS3 and SGS4.
Various fixes were put forward, both from people who had solved their problem and from people who didn't appear to know what they were talking about. I tried the more sensible fixes and nothing worked.
When I checked my Battery stats in Settings, I found that the media scanner was hogging the battery and keeping the phone awake all day, so I was one step nearer solving the problem. I killed the media scanner process and my battery life improved. But each time I restarted the phone, the problem came back.
I unmounted my 32GB micro-SD card (an absolute requisite in my use case) and waited. Interestingly, the problem continued, even though that's where the vast majority of my media files reside. So I went hunting.
I noticed that even though I'd unmounted the SD card, the /storage/extSdCard folder showed that it had one item inside it. If you know about Linux file systems, which Android uses, you'll know that external storage is mounted onto an existing directory - in the case of my SD card it's mounted on /storage/extSdCard. And if the external storage is unmounted, that directory reverts to being an ordinary directory.
When I looked inside that directory using ES File Explorer, I found a folder that had been created by an app called FlickFolio. It's a great app as it allows you to look at your Flickr stream, sets, etc, on your phone or tablet, and it keeps thumbnails of all your photos on the device to make viewing them very quick.
Now, my current Flickr stream has 9,263 photos in it, taken over the last 6 years. And this directory had over 55,000 subdirectories and files in it, taking up 3.02 GB. I had no idea that they were there because when my SD card is mounted, the FlickFolio directory disappears. It's still there but the mounted SD card covers it up.
So, I deleted the FlickFolio directory. It took nearly 10 minutes for ES File Explorer to do the job but not only did I retrieve a 'missing' 3.02 GB of internal phone storage space, I found that the media scanner is now behaving, and not sucking my battery to death. And my phone isn't overheating. And I'm a happy bunny again.
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Click to collapse
hi I have same problem with my galaxy s2 can you give me the idiots version of what to look for please as your only person who seems to know what your talking about I tried doing what you said above loaded es file explorer took out mem card but cant see flickfolio have I missed something or open somethink first to find it any help would be great regards bob
I have Samsung galaxy S2 android phone. I am facing a strange problem now these days. I usually download apps from android apps store. Today when I download an app, another rogue app downloads automatically. Do you know about the problem? Any solutions please.
If your battery low alltime? then firstly, Format your phone
Related
My SD card suddenly became unreadable and I have lost everything on it. I had to buy a new one. My question is, are there any apps that will sync my entire SD card with my PC remotely over the internet (WIFI or 4G) using SMB or FTP?
Thanks!
I searched quite a bit about this same issue about a month ago. I tried every app I could, and in the end 0 Backup Gold seemed to work the best. It dumps my SD card to my PC every night over wifi while the phone is charging.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.Odroid.ObackupGold
The other one I liked was FolderSync Lite, but I ran into an issue with it. The first time it copied, the power went out over night for a moment, dropping my wifi router temporarily. The next day I checked to see how the backup went and found that it was copying the Green Hornet file when the drop happened. The file copied on my PC was only about 100 megabytes, instead of the 1gb+ that the file on the SD card is. The next time FolderSync ran it skipped over the Green Hornet file instead of recopying it. So basically, it just looks for if the file name exists in the destination and copies it if it isn't there, leaving the corrupted file in the destination. I also had some memory leak problems with it. When I would run a sync overnight, my phone usually needed rebooting in the morning or was pretty much unresponsive.
0 Backup doesn't have a pretty UI, but I've found it to be reliable. It seems to know when something didn't copy correctly and recopies it on the next backup if need be. The silver version is free too, but doesn't have the scheduling capability. Might be nice if you just want to try it out first.
The other one I tried that worked OK was PCFileSync, but it keeps a huge ugly icon in the notification bar that just drove me nuts.
backlund said:
I searched quite a bit about this same issue about a month ago. I tried every app I could, and in the end 0 Backup Gold seemed to work the best. It dumps my SD card to my PC every night over wifi while the phone is charging.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.Odroid.ObackupGold
The other one I liked was FolderSync Lite, but I ran into an issue with it. The first time it copied, the power went out over night for a moment, dropping my wifi router temporarily. The next day I checked to see how the backup went and found that it was copying the Green Hornet file when the drop happened. The file copied on my PC was only about 100 megabytes, instead of the 1gb+ that the file on the SD card is. The next time FolderSync ran it skipped over the Green Hornet file instead of recopying it. So basically, it just looks for if the file name exists in the destination and copies it if it isn't there, leaving the corrupted file in the destination. I also had some memory leak problems with it. When I would run a sync overnight, my phone usually needed rebooting in the morning or was pretty much unresponsive.
0 Backup doesn't have a pretty UI, but I've found it to be reliable. It seems to know when something didn't copy correctly and recopies it on the next backup if need be. The silver version is free too, but doesn't have the scheduling capability. Might be nice if you just want to try it out first.
The other one I tried that worked OK was PCFileSync, but it keeps a huge ugly icon in the notification bar that just drove me nuts.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for your response. I can't believe I only got one response. I found FolderSync and ended up buying the full version, it was only $2.34, and its been working great so far. I'll look into those corrupt files though. I'll also give 0 Backup a look as well.
So something weird just happened to me. I have HTC Sync Manager installed on a Windows XP laptop. I did not have Sync Manager running. I connected my phone to my computer and set it to media sync with USB debugging connected. My internal memory and SD card popped up. I went in and deleted files and folders I no longer wanted from both. I always do this on the computer because it's much faster. I set the phone back to charge only and then unplugged it. I went into astro to take a look, and noticed there were no files or folders in both the internal memory and the SD card. I went to the storage option in the system settings and it showed I had 100% free space on my SD card and internal memory. All my apps are there though, as the 2GB partition was unaffected. It seems my SD card and internal memory were formatted somehow.
Has anyone else had this happen to them?
rabid platypus said:
So something weird just happened to me. I have HTC Sync Manager installed on a Windows XP laptop. I did not have Sync Manager running. I connected my phone to my computer and set it to media sync with USB debugging connected. My internal memory and SD card popped up. I went in and deleted files and folders I no longer wanted from both. I always do this on the computer because it's much faster. I set the phone back to charge only and then unplugged it. I went into astro to take a look, and noticed there were no files or folders in both the internal memory and the SD card. I went to the storage option in the system settings and it showed I had 100% free space on my SD card and internal memory. All my apps are there though, as the 2GB partition was unaffected. It seems my SD card and internal memory were formatted somehow.
Has anyone else had this happen to them?
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Click to collapse
Sometimes Windows can play you dirty. I would first suggest upgrading to Windows 7 because the write access to files on usb media was much improved, I've seen this issue happen to me several times with USB drives or flash drives in general. Sometimes I copy things and after unplugging the device the file I copied is not there, even though when I copied it, it told me that the operation was completed successfully.
Second of all, I would suggest that anytime you do an operation like this, never disconnect the media immediately, let it sit for a bit if you deleted large files or a large amount of files. Last but not least, it could of been human error, sometimes we just mess up and we don't even realize it.
Are you having any other problems with the phone? Are your apps working? was the total folder structure of the /sdcard and /sdcard/sd_ext erased ?
Same thing happened to me yesterday. But for me I'm pretty sure I unplugged it too quick and lost everything. At least everything was still running fine. I performed a quick titanium and nandroid backup and I was fine
Sent from my EVO using xda app-developers app
megabiteg said:
Sometimes Windows can play you dirty. I would first suggest upgrading to Windows 7 because the write access to files on usb media was much improved, I've seen this issue happen to me several times with USB drives or flash drives in general. Sometimes I copy things and after unplugging the device the file I copied is not there, even though when I copied it, it told me that the operation was completed successfully.
Second of all, I would suggest that anytime you do an operation like this, never disconnect the media immediately, let it sit for a bit if you deleted large files or a large amount of files. Last but not least, it could of been human error, sometimes we just mess up and we don't even realize it.
Are you having any other problems with the phone? Are your apps working? was the total folder structure of the /sdcard and /sdcard/sd_ext erased ?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's the funny thing. I let it sit for a minute until the phone fully loaded the memory just like I have done 100 times before. All apps are working, and the phone is working 100% otherwise. I'm guessing it's just a glitch, or a small voltage change could have wiped the memory.
That computer was my work computer, that's why it still has XP.
Hello.
After reading all similar posts, and not finding any solutions I'm turning to XDA developers for help.
I own a brand new (3 month old) T999V Galaxy S3.
The phone is not rooted, and for now, I do not plan on rooting it , in order to keep the warranty.
Approx a month ago , I have noticed, that at times my phone becomes non responsive, and stays non responsive for many hours in a row, significantly heats up, and looses a lot of battery charge.
I have investigated the issue: process /system/bin/sdcard hogs 47-50% of the CPU.
Killing the process simply restarts it again, rebooting the phone does not help.
Galaxy S3 has a "build in" internal SD card, and I'm also using an external one.
I have tried using two different external SD cards, but result was the same.
I have tried running the phone without any external SD card - the result: /system/bin/sdcard at 45% of the CPU !
So it seems that external sd cards are not causing the problem.
I suspected, that a media storage might cause this issue: I had completely reset media storage - to no avail.
Any suggestions, short of "factory reset your device", are more than welcome.
Few illustrations are attached.
Anyone?
Anyone? No one willing to help with the issue?
Solution found
As I figured out that none is volunteering to help, I had resorted to figuring it out myself.
So first I'd like to properly describe the problem:
Every time the galaxy was rebooted, the phone was unresponsive for many hours in a row.
Using an android app called process monitor, I have established that the process that was occupying CPU was named, /system/bin/sdcard .
After reading some Android development documentation I came to a conclusion that the process itself is not to blame: /system/bin/sdcard is a process spanned by SD card access service, and the real culprit could be any application accessing the SD card.
My gut feeling told me that it is somehow related to the notorious media scanner. So I went to Settings>Applications>Running applications, and stopped application called Media. Then I cleared the memory , and suddenly CPU consumption was normal again.
So I found the "what" now I needed to figure "why".
Using android programming documentation again, I have determined that the way media scanner is working is by traversing all directories for all files, and then my bet was that the scanner is getting stuck in one of those directories.
In order to empirically detect which directory was problematic I have used "Storage analyser".
This is a tool showing the size of the folders, and I figured that if a scanner got stuck on a problematic folder, "Storage analyser" will also get stuck on it.
As predicted it got stuck on a following folder:
/Android/data/com.sec.android.allshare .
Using file browser I have determined that the folder contained around 62000 (yes sixty two thousand) files.
As it was impossible to browse within this folder (the file browser was getting stuck when entering this folder, I have simply deleted it.
Further investigation shown that the folder is getting regenerated after reboot, and it contains Samsung Allshare temporary files.
So that's it - removing the folder with a very large number of files has done the trick.
Now my phone works flawlessly, and I'm keeping my eye on the Allshare folder (Samsung shame on you).
So anyone with the "media scanner running slow" problem. Search your drive for a folder with exceedingly large number of files, and get rid of this folder (if you can).
Keywords:
Galaxy S3 high CPU consumption,Android high CPU consumption,Android media scanner slow, Galaxy S3 Slow, Phone is slow on boot.
Amazingly enough, I had this same issue, and I was up to 80k files. Took 3 hours to delete them all. What got me searching was the fact that my tumblr app stop animating gif files. Not sure how, but they were indeed related. Perhaps being rooted had something to do with it. Anyways, I've removed allshare, and there are no signs of temp files growing again.
Removing large folder resolves problem
I too had a similar problem on my Galaxy S3, however, I'm running CyanogenMod 10.1 and not the stock ROM, so my problem was not related to the Allshare app.
I started noticing terrible battery drain (suddenly), I knew something had to be wrong because my battery usually lasts forever, so I started digging. I found that the /system/bin/sdcard process consuming almost all of my battery (battery stats screen under settings).
So next I opened up SSH and connected to my phone's shell. Took a look at top and can see that /system/bin/sdcard was consuming all of my CPU constantly, thus draining my battery amazingly fast. After searching around a bit about this problem, I came across this thread (after looking at pages of similar error reports with no real answers). So I decided to see if I could tell what the sdcard process was doing with files.
So next I ran:
lsof | grep media_rw
Which will show you any files opened by the user media_rw (the user running /system/bin/sdcard)... this led me to the application and directory that was causing the problem. The application stores an image cache and that directory had over 60,000 files in it. Some oddities however, the folder did have a '.nomedia' file in it, which should have told the media scanner to skip it. The files were also not named with an image extension. Also, these files were not on the sdcard at all but the internal phone storage.
I decided to give deleting the files a try, so I did a
rm -f *
in that directory... I got an error message indicating that there were too many arguments... a limitation in the rm binary or the filesystem maybe as well. So I backed up a directory and did a rm -Rf on the directory, which after some time removed the files. Immediately my CPU and battery stabilized and are back to normal.
All of this makes me think that there is really just some limit around 60,000 (65K is a magic number?) to what the filesystem can handle in a single directory (efficiently).
Anyhow thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
Wouldn't putting .nomedia in the root of the folder prevent it from being scanned at all? Rather than deleting folders that you don't know the function of?
I am new to Samsung, coming from HTC Desire. And got into bizarre already )
A couple of days ago noticed a strange problem with photos in galery unreadable, appearing to be corrupt (all of them on external sd, internal sd photos are displayed properly). Then today happened that Music app couldn't play music files on external SD.
Read countless of similar issues on the internet, with lots of people blaming on the sd card. However, I found that it is not the case.
Put into a SD card reader and plug into PC, the files on SD card are all ok.
Put back card into phone and investigated further. First I thought maybe it's a problem with SD card reader in the phone. BUT! Noticed files are perfectly visible in ES File Explorer, and even display correctly when using Gallery App to open them from ES file explorer. But if Gallery is opened first, it cannot display files.
I'm sure somebody else happened the same, since the internet is full with such reports regarding Galaxy devices (even S1 and Note alike), but anyone identified the sorce of the problem and eventually solved it? I would be very much interested.
crisagatie said:
I am new to Samsung, coming from HTC Desire. And got into bizarre already )
A couple of days ago noticed a strange problem with photos in galery unreadable, appearing to be corrupt (all of them on external sd, internal sd photos are displayed properly). Then today happened that Music app couldn't play music files on external SD.
Read countless of similar issues on the internet, with lots of people blaming on the sd card. However, I found that it is not the case.
Put into a SD card reader and plug into PC, the files on SD card are all ok.
Put back card into phone and investigated further. First I thought maybe it's a problem with SD card reader in the phone. BUT! Noticed files are perfectly visible in ES File Explorer, and even display correctly when using Gallery App to open them from ES file explorer. But if Gallery is opened first, it cannot display files.
I'm sure somebody else happened the same, since the internet is full with such reports regarding Galaxy devices (even S1 and Note alike), but anyone identified the sorce of the problem and eventually solved it? I would be very much interested.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try to run Rescan Media app from Play store.
Maybe your media scanner service does not work properly and needs to refresh the list of media files on your sd card.
Good luck !
rescan is done automatically every reboot. doesn't help. thanx anyway.
investigated further and found out that the files are not corrupt, but the libraries of Music app and Gallery app created duplicated empty files (in fact 2 fake entries in library for every valid file on the card). Duplicate files don't exist physically on SD card, only in libraries of the two applications.
Already tried formatting cache and dalvik cache, but to no avail...
ICS 4.0.4 Orange Romania (BVLPH) stock ROM.
Later EDIT: This was an easy one. Unmounted SD Card and open Gallery app and Music app. Then re-mount SD Card, both apps will refresh libraries, wait a while for media scan in the background and voila: duplicate files disappear, everything is in god order.
I had a similar problem where both gallery and music files were duplicated, but the duplicates were unreadable.
My solution was Settings -> Applications -> All -> Media Storage -> Clear Data.
This forced a refresh and everything turned normal again.
Slightly annoying that the media scan data is stored under a separate application and not within the data of the gallery or music player applications, but once I discovered this it was an easy fix.
A few days ago while I was on ICS 4.0 on my SGS3 (can't remember whether 4.0.3 or 4.0.4 - international stock ROM either way), I noticed that my phone was not displaying pictures correctly. For example, I took a picture with my camera and it automatically saved it to my SD card, after which it would say the picture cannot be opened. I then transferred my photos to the internal memory as I felt my SD card was getting corrupted, however the music on it still worked fine. Then I noticed a huge increase in battery usage, mostly consumed by the 'Media Storage' application (60-70%). I then updated my phone to JB 4.1.2, and my pictures would not show up at all (music was alright). After some research I found out that there could be a faulty Media Storage app, but it only mentioned the rooted ROM version for people wanting JB earlier than the release date. I did what the instructions I found told me and cleared the data on the Media Storage app (around 4 GB). This solved the problem momentarily but the data keeps going up and using the battery. Now I'm stuck with the Media Storage disabled since I need my battery, however it's annoying to hear a full ringtone for a simple notification, not to mention I want to listen to my music.
What I want to know is, is it a problem of a faulty SD card, corrupted (music) files, or a faulty Media Storage app?
I haven't tried removing the SD card and leaving it to see if it still consumes battery but I just formatted it and am looking to see what happens.
With the Media Storage off, there have been HUGE improvements on battery life! Wow.
istetz said:
A few days ago while I was on ICS 4.0 on my SGS3 (can't remember whether 4.0.3 or 4.0.4 - international stock ROM either way), I noticed that my phone was not displaying pictures correctly. For example, I took a picture with my camera and it automatically saved it to my SD card, after which it would say the picture cannot be opened. I then transferred my photos to the internal memory as I felt my SD card was getting corrupted, however the music on it still worked fine. Then I noticed a huge increase in battery usage, mostly consumed by the 'Media Storage' application (60-70%). I then updated my phone to JB 4.1.2, and my pictures would not show up at all (music was alright). After some research I found out that there could be a faulty Media Storage app, but it only mentioned the rooted ROM version for people wanting JB earlier than the release date. I did what the instructions I found told me and cleared the data on the Media Storage app (around 4 GB). This solved the problem momentarily but the data keeps going up and using the battery. Now I'm stuck with the Media Storage disabled since I need my battery, however it's annoying to hear a full ringtone for a simple notification, not to mention I want to listen to my music.
What I want to know is, is it a problem of a faulty SD card, corrupted (music) files, or a faulty Media Storage app?
I haven't tried removing the SD card and leaving it to see if it still consumes battery but I just formatted it and am looking to see what happens.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You could try formatting your SD card, if this doesn't work it may be the case that your SD card has bad sectors.
If you want to know wether that is the case, you can try this:
Click Start and then Run. Type cmd and then click OK. Type the following:
chkdsk [sd card drive letter] /r
That will scan for bad sectors on the card and repair any found.
on the PC, that is