[Q] Help - System apps chewing up excessive data - Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

For the last couple of week my phones system apps have been using appx 10-15Mb per day in 3G data and I have no idea why.
It's chewing up most my allowance and I'm going to have to disable the APN soon if I can't find out what's causing it.
I know it's a system app as i'm using TrafficStats Lite but it doesn't tell me exactly what the source of the problem is. It lists the below under the section that is causing me the problem:
Contracts Storage
Dialer
People
com.android.providers.applications
Plugin sample
com.android.providers.userdictionary

Hi,
first of all try market://search?q=pname:com.curvefish.apps.trafficinfo
shows trafffic per app
maybe you try to disable background sync?
a other option would be droidwall, so you can enable every app that should get internet access and the others wont get it - needs root.
cya

TrafficInfo doesn't give me any better info than TrafficStats Lite.
Also, disabling background sync doesn't tell me why the system is suddenly using up 10-15mb a day when it has never used anything like that in the 10months i've had it.
Droidwall will be useful in the short term until I can find out why my system apps are using so much data though.
Thanks.

Hi,
Sorry to bring up this old thread, but since a month or so I have been noticing the exact same thing on my HTC Legend. Got a 500MB monthly limit, never got even close to consuming it all... but in November, data usage got crazy and I hit the limit.
3G Watchdog shows me these apps as the top data consumer: "People", "com.android.providers.userdictionary", "Dialer", "Contacts Storage" and "com.android.providers.applications". These all show up as one combined entry, and for example have consumed 9MB only yesterday.
Anyone know what exactly is going on here?
Thanks for any advice,
wwwald

wwwald said:
Hi,
Sorry to bring up this old thread, but since a month or so I have been noticing the exact same thing on my HTC Legend. Got a 500MB monthly limit, never got even close to consuming it all... but in November, data usage got crazy and I hit the limit.
3G Watchdog shows me these apps as the top data consumer: "People", "com.android.providers.userdictionary", "Dialer", "Contacts Storage" and "com.android.providers.applications". These all show up as one combined entry, and for example have consumed 9MB only yesterday.
Anyone know what exactly is going on here?
Thanks for any advice,
wwwald
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ask in section for HTC Legend, not in the one for the desire.

MatDrOiD said:
Ask in section for HTC Legend, not in the one for the desire.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sorry for that, will do.

Related

3G Watchdog

You all have no problems with this app?
For me it shows a lot less have been downloaded than it actually was.
Example:
app shows 400MB, but on my providers page it shows 600MB has been downloaded this month!
I need a nice widget that shows correct 3G download numbers!
A number of factors can effect the readings and monitoring of your device.
When did you install can effect the reading as you might have been downloading prior to installation.
Incorrect date setting with regards to when your monthly data download starts.
Not running. If you tend to kill applications you might have killed watchdog by accident so was not running at the time you were downloading.
I think some kill applications allow for you to add other applications to an exemption list, applications you don't want to kill. You might need to check these settings.
Hope this helps you solve your data miss match.
yani2000 said:
You all have no problems with this app?
For me it shows a lot less have been downloaded than it actually was.
Example:
app shows 400MB, but on my providers page it shows 600MB has been downloaded this month!
I need a nice widget that shows correct 3G download numbers!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
the "month" of your provider, is not usually the "month" that you have in mind.
they go by your billing cycle
so reset your data count to match the next billing cycle
I'm using Automatic Task Killer and I've also double checked that 3G Watchdog isn't starred.
The moment I installed 3G Watchdog I've also set "Last started on" to 1st July 2010.
Now, I have corrected my quota under: Menu->Set quota Counters... to reflect my providers data and will see how it will go through.
Thx for all your replies!
yani2000 said:
Now, I have corrected my quota under: Menu->Set quota Counters... to reflect my providers data and will see how it will go through.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thankyou for sharing this information. I didn't know that myself.
I'm back to inform you all that 3G Watchdog is still off target!
First it showed 20MB less now it shows 40MB less.
First I thought that it doesn't count 2G, but I double checked and saw that in fact it did took 2G data into account.
Now I'm leaning towards that my network provider is cheating or something.
Does your provider count your network traffic exactly like 3g watchdog or e.g. 100kb-parts...that would have an impact!
Does any one know how to find out if your provider counts the data in blocks?
Send them an e-mail and ask them.
Is there an alternative to 3g watchdog it is definitely not calculating my usage correctly and this could potantially be very costly for me, unfortunately an unlimited data plan in this recession hit country is like everything else way too expensive so i just pay 69 cents a day for 50MB and if i go over than (which i have done before) they charge you a fortune which is why i use 3g watchdog which incidentally used to run fine on my old HD2 but since ive got the GS2 it's been constanly wrong if i send a text to check my balance which ive just done i can see ive used 41.69MB so far today yet 3g watchdog tells me ive only used 20.69 that is over half so imagine i forgot to send a text to get my balance and just keep surfing the net,suddendly i discover all my credit is eaten up, Meteor don't care they aint in the business of warning people who go over their 50MB daily limit which is why it's imperative i have the correct usuage.
Sorry for the long post but you can see my prediament.
Try Dodol phone usage. In settings, make sure the refresh time is 1 minute (which should be the default value).
Hi!
Yes, I see 3G Watchdog had some problems:
Overview:
* KNOWN PROBLEMS:
- [June 2011] Inaccuracy reported on Samsung with Gingerbread 2.3.3. Might be solved in 3GW 0.28.2 with the new option to use the old counting interface.
What's new:
Fixed accuracy problems on some Samsung phones with Gingerbread.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I hope the updated version helped!

[Q] phone downloading 80+ megs every night

About a week ago my phone started downloading 'something', about 80 megs of something, every night. It must happen in the middle of the night, I've never been awake to witness it happen. When I look at my phone in the morning I have no system messages, nothing indicated in download manager, basically no hint that anything had happened. I would not have noticed had I not been checked my data usage with my provider.
3G Watchdog attributes it to "Downloads / Media Storage / DRM Protected Content Storage / Download Manager". I have no idea what is afoot here. I don't remember much changing in the last week except for the Market update that was pushed out. No ROM changes or anything radical like that.
Look for advice how to isolate this and make it stop.
HTC Desire Z running Gingervillain 1.5
Thanks in advance.
There's nothing like a podcatcher that runs at night? Or maybe updates? Hmm...
Not that I am aware of. And I hoped that 3G Watchdog would tell if that was the case (I only installed it last week, to try and sort out this problem.)
I have my market updates set to manual. I'm not subscribed to any media services as far as I know. And this is the same amount of data every night. Is there any possibility I'm received an OTA Android update or something that my phone doesn't know what to do with?
I tried *#*#4636#*#* but could not figure out how to get any bandwidth usage stats out of it, so for now this is all the detail I have.
twelvebit said:
About a week ago my phone started downloading 'something', about 80 megs of something, every night. It must happen in the middle of the night, I've never been awake to witness it happen. When I look at my phone in the morning I have no system messages, nothing indicated in download manager, basically no hint that anything had happened. I would not have noticed had I not been checked my data usage with my provider.
3G Watchdog attributes it to "Downloads / Media Storage / DRM Protected Content Storage / Download Manager". I have no idea what is afoot here. I don't remember much changing in the last week except for the Market update that was pushed out. No ROM changes or anything radical like that.
Look for advice how to isolate this and make it stop.
HTC Desire Z running Gingervillain 1.5
Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you don't have any podcast apps installed and set up to run, or anything obvious like that) you could always mount your media card on your computer and sort by date to see what's new.
Sent from my HTC Vision using XDA App
OriginalGabriel said:
If you don't have any podcast apps installed and set up to run, or anything obvious like that) you could always mount your media card on your computer and sort by date to see what's new.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks, good idea. I just did a complete search via USB connection (I assume this only checks the SDCARD and not the phone's internal memory?) and I can't find anything new from the last few days. There were no new media files except for a few photos I had taken, and no large system files or anything I couldn't explain.
It definitely doesn't seem like I'm lost 80 megs of storage every day, I probably would have noticed that (maybe.)
twelvebit said:
Thanks, good idea. I just did a complete search via USB connection (I assume this only checks the SDCARD and not the phone's internal memory?) and I can't find anything new from the last few days. There were no new media files except for a few photos I had taken, and no large system files or anything I couldn't explain.
It definitely doesn't seem like I'm lost 80 megs of storage every day, I probably would have noticed that (maybe.)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Only thing I can think then is to check your sync settings and make sure all the apps you've installed since this has happened are from trusted sources (a few botnets have shown up in Android recently); that and go through your list of installed apps to see if there's anything there that you didn't install (note: there is a rogue app that is listed as 'System' but doesn't have the default Android system icon out there).
Does the app that caught this distinguish (damn, how do you spell that word?) between something actually being downloaded and just general network traffic? Your device may just be hammering the towers for a better signal or something like that.
Sent from my HTC Vision using XDA App
Actually, there's a means to do this in Spare Parts
Dial *#*#4636#*#* (or launch Spare Parts if you have it installed)
Click Usage Statistics
Click Battery history
Click the Other usage dropdown
Click network usage
Since this is happening at night, you'll need to reboot before bed and then select "since boot" to see what happened overnight.
Sent from my HTC Vision using XDA App
OriginalGabriel said:
Only thing I can think then is to check your sync settings and make sure all the apps you've installed since this has happened are from trusted sources (a few botnets have shown up in Android recently); that and go through your list of installed apps to see if there's anything there that you didn't install (note: there is a rogue app that is listed as 'System' but doesn't have the default Android system icon out there).
Does the app that caught this distinguish (damn, how do you spell that word?) between something actually being downloaded and just general network traffic? Your device may just be hammering the towers for a better signal or something like that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just eyeballed all of my applications and I don't see anything I don't recognize. Nothing called System. A few system-ish things where I don't know what they do, but they all have Android icons.
I did have all untrusted applications selected because I installed the Amazon app store a while ago.
The Watchdog app seems to indicate the downloaded data is happening all at once, it's not cumulative data from the day, I can update it real time and see what's happening. Moreover, nothing has changed with my location or phone usage, and I normally would have 1-2 megs of data usage a day tops.
Tonight I will shut of 3G data when I go to bed and I'll see if it generates any kind of warning overnight. Good thing I have a big data plan...
twelvebit, I ran into the same problem you had as my phone was also downloading 80-90 megs data every night for about three days before I noticed it. I also narrowed it down to Download Manager. Another problem I had with it is that it uses a constant data connection at every phone bootup. I had to manually force stop Download Manager at every bootup so that it'll free up the data connection again. I pretty much went through my phone and SD card and there was no new files of any type. I don't use any podcast apps. I also didn't install any new apps before this started. After a couple of days of trouble shooting, I gave up and just did a complete wipe. The phantom data stopped after I reinstalled a new rom and hasn't pop back up since. I was running CM 6.1. Sorry I couldn't be of much help.
I just turn my data off at night because for some reason my phone would do the same. I even got rid of my weather widgets because I couldn't figure the problem out. For weird reason android does that mystery downloading.
Sent from my HTC Vision using XDA App
So I left data off overnight, and as soon as I turned it back on this AM it immediately did performed the phantom 77 meg download. There was no indication on the phone anywhere that it was downloading anything, it's only because I looked a my usage stats that I saw it happened.
Guess my next step is to wipe...?
313dash said:
I just turn my data off at night because for some reason my phone would do the same. I even got rid of my weather widgets because I couldn't figure the problem out. For weird reason android does that mystery downloading.
Sent from my HTC Vision using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Did you go into Spare Parts to see what app was pulling the most data?
Sent from my HTC Vision using XDA App
OriginalGabriel said:
Did you go into Spare Parts to see what app was pulling the most data?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I flashed to the nightly cyanogenmod this AM, and in doing so I guess I lost my stats. I've never really used spare parts before. It doesn't look like "the" download has been attempted since I reflashed, but that's typical since it happens once per night.
Right now my biggest network using item is called "0", the others are dialer and android system. What is 0? When I try and select it, spare parts crashes.
Is there a way to get hard numbers out of spare parts, or just the graphs? (it's showing blue and pink bars for each.)
twelvebit said:
I flashed to the nightly cyanogenmod this AM, and in doing so I guess I lost my stats. I've never really used spare parts before. It doesn't look like "the" download has been attempted since I reflashed, but that's typical since it happens once per night.
Right now my biggest network using item is called "0", the others are dialer and android system. What is 0? When I try and select it, spare parts crashes.
Is there a way to get hard numbers out of spare parts, or just the graphs? (it's showing blue and pink bars for each.)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not sure what '0' is.
Spare Parts just gives you the bar graph but I did another search and found 'Stats' and 'Onavo' in the Market, both should help you find the problemed app. Again, Spare Parts should show it if you reboot before bed and then check it in the morning and narrowing it down by "since boot".
EDIT: I take that back, hit the bar graph in Spare Parts and it gives you the actual data.
Sent from my HTC Vision using XDA App
Guys, I'm having the exact same problem and I am puzzled why it's happening. I came across something from the droid forum:
In brief, to quote the poster:
I found a thread on the Cyanogenmod forums that supports the idea that while my oldish CM kernel was effectively blocking an OTA from installing, it wasn't preventing it from repeatedly downloading and attempting install. There is an app to fake the fingerprint so an OTA is not even downloaded since it appears to have already been applied. Just installed it so no confirmation of the fix yet, but I should know in a day or so. I'd pretty much concluded that the issue was an OTA since it was always coming via 3G even when I was at home with Wifi on. If it had been a misbehaving app, it would have originated on the phone and would have used Wifi. An OTA originates from the carrier so always comes via 3G. IMHO.
Any comment?
It's a little too early to declare victory, but last night was the first night on the new ROM and the phone did not do any inexplicable downloading.
If I learn anything else I will post it here for those others who are suffering the same issue.
Get traffic counter. It'll tell you what's using those megabytes. I used almost 1GB on my phone and it was the friend stream app on HTC Sense & Sensation.
Sent from my HTC Sensation Z710e using xda premium

ICS data usage reporting accurate?

I apologize if this has been brought up before, but the data reporting in ICS is almost double what the myverizon app is showing.
Just wondering if the usage shown by Verizon is going to catch up. If not I got a lot more streaming I can do
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App
do you have a task killer installed, if so then you may be killing the myverizon tracker their for its not collecting all data
You need to set the data usage to match your billing cycle dates than it should match. I have found that it needs set manually.
Please hit the thanks button if I helped.
Don't know about VZ, but comparing Tmo's website and ICS's data meter, they're almost identical (ICS was a few MB ahead)
The 'Total Data Usage' meter appears to be relatively consistent with my operators readings (Sunrise/Switzerland).
On the other hand, the 'per app' reading appears to be completely off the wall. (See this thread.)
etbrandt2 said:
I apologize if this has been brought up before, but the data reporting in ICS is almost double what the myverizon app is showing.
Just wondering if the usage shown by Verizon is going to catch up. If not I got a lot more streaming I can do
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Measured by your phone. Your carrier's data usage accounting may differ.
My carrier (Unitel, Laos) is reporting me using just over double the data ICS is reporting.
I'm on O2 in the UK and the ICS data is about 85 mb behind the networks calculation ?
Two days ago I was pushing 2GB and now suddenly I have only used 608 MB? How can that be explained?
Has anyone seen their usage suddenly go down for no reason?
I'm in the middle of the billing cycle. I've done nothing to the phone.
Now I've lost all faith in the data usage meter.
GR
GPSRider said:
Two days ago I was pushing 2GB and now suddenly I have only used 608 MB? How can that be explained?
Has anyone seen their usage suddenly go down for no reason?
I'm in the middle of the billing cycle. I've done nothing to the phone.
Now I've lost all faith in the data usage meter.
GR
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You remember to move the slider to correct date? It doesnt do this by default so it looks like your data usage dropped everytime you go to the data usage section.
Yes, it doesn't matter where the sliders are set, I get the same result.
It appears to have forgotten about one week's worth of data, my first week. I got the phone on the sixth and now it is showing zero data used until the 12th.
My usage cycle is set for 27th-26th, so it doesn't make any sense to me that it would suddenly forget about six days of data.
It's forgotten about the data used on the wifi side before the 12th as well.
Any ideas?
GR
For me the "data usage" on the phone was reporting slightly higher than VZW, but imo that's better than slightly lower!
badassirocz said:
You need to set the data usage to match your billing cycle dates than it should match. I have found that it needs set manually.
Please hit the thanks button if I helped.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There is no way to set it manually! If I am wrong please correct me.
GPSRider said:
Two days ago I was pushing 2GB and now suddenly I have only used 608 MB? How can that be explained?
Has anyone seen their usage suddenly go down for no reason?
I'm in the middle of the billing cycle. I've done nothing to the phone.
Now I've lost all faith in the data usage meter.
GR
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes I have experienced the same! I was around 3GB, my phone went completely dead on a Sat night, when I plugged it up in the car and tried to boot it back up it apparently didn't have the juice to boot all the way. I let it charge for a while, booted it, all my SMS tones had been reset and so was my "data usage"!! Sucks!
Well, I have let the battery run down until the phone turned itself off several times, but I hope this is not causing this problem. That would be a pretty significant bug!

[Q] Built in data usage app

This seems to have been asked in a few previous posts, however, I can find no definitive answer.
My problem revolves around a spike in data usage last night. I had decided with the announcement of Google Reader being retired (grrr) I would replace gReader as my default RSS reader with RssDemon (which actually turns out to be just as good).
Once I had manually added all my feeds into RssDemon, I decided to uninstall gReader. This was whilst at home and connected to wi-fi.
Within a couple of hours I received my preset warning over data usage, which upon checking had spiked up 140mb due to 'Removed Apps'.
Now, having only had the phone a couple of weeks, I have monitored data usage very closely from day one, to ensure there are no background services wasting my data plan.
My gReader usage before uninstalling was around the 35mb mark. Why on earth would it jump up so high just from removal ?
Has it actually used the data or is it possible it is an error in the calculation within the Usage app itself ?
Any help / advice greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Lee
Couple of Questions
cc
I think you might have misunderstood how these forum type things work mate
You may want to try and start your own thread
wenndie said:
Hi
I have two Note II's. One I bought and rooted (Korean made) then had a few problems so I bought another (made in China - different sellers).
Anyway the first one is good now with PACMAN AOKP 4.2.2 the other still fully Samsung.
I cant get my work exchange email to work on either. Any recommendations for an app? Will happily pay if it will work.
secondly I would like to install a nice bootanimation on my rooted device, something tasteful like the mega droid walk. Will this work on my 4.2.2/ Have had issues installing any bootanimations so I rerooted and dont want to stuff it up again
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
TommyPeanuts said:
I think you might have misunderstood how these forum type things work mate
You may want to try and start your own thread
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
humble apologies = my error entirely
no worries mate
Anyone able to offer any possible explanations ?
Did you ever change roms? And restore data via titanium backup?
Because if you o store usage data via titanium backup then there is a chance of getting it corrupted. Sometimes after reset it would show me that system. UI has use 1.97 his which actually real racing 3 has use this is I think it's because android signs apps unique id on the basis of which it stores data usage. When you reset it probably assigns them which overlap which previous ones which caused the data usage to show wrong info.
this is SPARTAAA
TommyPeanuts said:
This seems to have been asked in a few previous posts, however, I can find no definitive answer.
My problem revolves around a spike in data usage last night. I had decided with the announcement of Google Reader being retired (grrr) I would replace gReader as my default RSS reader with RssDemon (which actually turns out to be just as good).
Once I had manually added all my feeds into RssDemon, I decided to uninstall gReader. This was whilst at home and connected to wi-fi.
Within a couple of hours I received my preset warning over data usage, which upon checking had spiked up 140mb due to 'Removed Apps'.
Now, having only had the phone a couple of weeks, I have monitored data usage very closely from day one, to ensure there are no background services wasting my data plan.
My gReader usage before uninstalling was around the 35mb mark. Why on earth would it jump up so high just from removal ?
Has it actually used the data or is it possible it is an error in the calculation within the Usage app itself ?
Any help / advice greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Lee
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Does your carrier not provide you with an option to check actual data usage from their end? You could compare and see the actual one with the built in usage data.
Sent from my GT-N7100 using xda premium

Insanely high data usage of "OS Services"

I noticed today that a few days back the "OS Services" consumed 491 Megabytes of 3G data and 1.81 Gigabytes of WiFi data (as reported by 'my data manager'). That's half my monthly data in one day. In the following days I have seen usage of around 60MB per day, and right now it is virtually down to zero again.
Does anybody know what could be causing this, and how I can prevent it from happening again?
Sent from my Nexus 9 using Tapatalk
OTA update being downloaded?
Doesnt the data management in settings tell you what app has been using data?
If its in the background, there should be an option to cancel background downloads
Phurkus said:
Doesnt the data management in settings tell you what app has been using data?
If its in the background, there should be an option to cancel background downloads
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No, it says "OS Services", which isn't helpful at all. There was nothing to see in the notification area about something being downloaded, so nothing I could cancel. In fact, I didn't even know something was downloading until I checked my data usage for the month and saw that I had consumed over 50% of my monthly allocation in just 4 days.
srv1973 said:
No, it says "OS Services", which isn't helpful at all. There was nothing to see in the notification area about something being downloaded, so nothing I could cancel. In fact, I didn't even know something was downloading until I checked my data usage for the month and saw that I had consumed over 50% of my monthly allocation in just 4 days.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
it probobly something downloading in the background. do you have your apps set to auto-update? they might be updateing themselfs in the background and not telling you

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