Bing News - Runaway Process?

[hopmedic]

Since the last update (under 8.1 preview) I've been having increasing frequency of some runaway processes heating up my phone while in the holster on my belt, and running the battery down. I've had to restart the phone multiple times to kill whatever process it was. Today I remembered (DUH!) that I could see how much each app is using the battery by looking in the battery saver app. By far, the app using my battery the most is the (Bing) News app. So at this moment I'm reinstalling the app, and if that doesn't solve the problem, I'm tossing up two ideas - first, get rid of that app and see if that resolves the problem, and second, if it doesn't, factory reset my phone and see if that does it. I just wish they'd get us the next update so that hopefully it would resolve whatever this problem is.

Is anyone else experiencing anything similar to this?

 

[Nerdy Woman]

Checking Bing News on my L920, it uses very little battery. But I noticed that Fuse (RSS reader) uses quite a lot. By tapping on the app name, you can see how much the app is using battery when the app is in use and when the app is running in background. That explains why Fuse is a battery hog. I've been reading through articles from 60+ websites, using it frequently and for long periods of time (there's my DUH).

You might also look at data sense to see if another app is constantly downloading. For Bing News, I'm showing about 10 MB total for the past 15 days. Admittedly, I don't use it as my primary news reader, so it's not downloading a lot of full articles.

Also, in Battery Saver, if you scroll all the way to the bottom and tap Show All Apps, you can verify that apps that don't need to run in background are not allowed to do so. I just found that tool and discovered a lot of recent installs that allowed themselves...

 

[anon(7901790)]

I've had a runaway process too. But I'm not sure which one it is. I THOUGHT it might have been Pandora, or Here Drive+, but I can't seem to replicate the issue with them. It might have been the Nokia Car app, but since they broke the accessories app when they updated it to device hub, I can't replicate that either. I'm not sure if it is any ONE app. I'm wondering if the last update broke some APIs and not letting apps close down properly once in a while.

Btw, for me the biggest hog was Pocket File Manager. I don't know why I had it to be allowed to run in the background. Facebook, is the next biggest hog. Bing News and Cortana are 9th and 10th respectively.

 

[anon(7901790)]

Edit: Based on what Nerdy Woman said, I did a check and most of my Facebook and PFM usage was "in use" versus background.

I don't think Battery Sense helps much for run-a-way or crashed apps. If the OS says the app is closed, I don't think Battery Sense "sees" it as running anymore; and therefore if the app goes into run-a-way mode, it doesn't track that app's battery usage.

Does that make sense?

 

[Nerdy Woman]

Edit: Based on what Nerdy Woman said, I did a check and most of my Facebook and PFM usage was "in use" versus background.

I don't think Battery Sense helps much for run-a-way or crashed apps. If the OS says the app is closed, I don't think Battery Sense "sees" it as running anymore; and therefore if the app goes into run-a-way mode, it doesn't track that app's battery usage.

Does that make sense?

Makes sense to me. Maybe we should call those Ninja Apps, stealth battery thieves that they are.

 

[hopmedic]

Well, all, thanks for the feedback. Fortunately I haven't had a single problem since I reinstalled the Bing News app last night. I know that doesn't mean the problem is solved yet - it could be that it is just a coincidence - but for the moment all is good, which makes it look like Bing News was the culprit. We'll see. :wink:

 

[hopmedic]

Ok - so my phone was heating up again. I was reading news in both Bing News and USA Today, and it was still heating up. So I looked in the Battery Saver app, and it had IE as using the most battery. I pull up IE, and there is no open tab - just the blank one that you see if you don't have any pages opened. For kicks, rather than restart my phone, I tried going to tabs, and closing that one tab (yes, the blank one), and seeing if that helped. Of course, you know it opened another blank tab, but it was worth a shot.

Ten minutes later my phone is as cool as I'd like it to be - down to room temperature in a jiffy. Perhaps there is some benefit to using the Battery Saver app to diagnose those runaway processes?? Or am I just getting lucky with the coincidences?

 

[anon(7901790)]

As a person who used to trouble shoot a nuclear missile system, if the error or problem was not reproducible then it's not a problem. Next time that happens, see if you can reproduce problem again. Otherwise, it's just a coincidence. For all we know there could be a background process crashing; one that we can't see because we don't have access to the background processes.

One of those Ninja Apps (thanks Nerdy Woman).

 

[hopmedic]

As a person who used to trouble shoot a nuclear missile system...

:wink:
I used to operate/troubleshoot a nuclear power plant on a submarine. Later I was a paramedic and my troubleshooting was on the human body. Now I pretty much limit it to computers, plumbing around the house, car troubles..... Well, I guess it's not limited. :wink:

 

[Eric J F]

Bing News on my 8.1 HTC 8X uses a minimal amount of juice. Ironically, until the last update I had the opposite problem- the app would frequently crash and close. Clearing the IE cache seemed to help temporarily; you might try that. I was about to give up on it, but it seems better now.

 

[anon(7901790)]

My phone decided to go into melt down mode this morning. It took a few soft resets to bring it back to normal. The only thing I did was check Facebook and my calendar. Both of which normally sip power when in the background.

@Eric J F - Hmmm...not a bad idea. I cleared mine to see what happens. I'm debating whether to do a hard reset. It's frustrating not being able to track down the problem(s?).

@hopmedic - Yeah, my troubleshooting is pretty much the same (minus the paramedic stuff). What makes trying to figure this out harder is that we don't have access to the inner workings of the OS, schematics, etc. When troubleshooting the missile (Pershing II to be exact), we had access to manuals, schematics, and the ability to run a diagnostic program to help us narrow it down.

At any rate, I'm starting to think it's not any ONE app that is causing the problem. I think it may be that Microsoft made some changes to the APIs and sometimes an app either crashes or doesn't shutdown properly and goes into Ninja mode.

 

[hopmedic]

Bing News on my 8.1 HTC 8X uses a minimal amount of juice. Ironically, until the last update I had the opposite problem- the app would frequently crash and close. Clearing the IE cache seemed to help temporarily; you might try that. I was about to give up on it, but it seems better now.

I'll give that a try - thanks.

My phone decided to go into melt down mode this morning. It took a few soft resets to bring it back to normal. The only thing I did was check Facebook and my calendar. Both of which normally sip power when in the background.

@Eric J F - Hmmm...not a bad idea. I cleared mine to see what happens. I'm debating whether to do a hard reset. It's frustrating not being able to track down the problem(s?).

@hopmedic - Yeah, my troubleshooting is pretty much the same (minus the paramedic stuff). What makes trying to figure this out harder is that we don't have access to the inner workings of the OS, schematics, etc. When troubleshooting the missile (Pershing II to be exact), we had access to manuals, schematics, and the ability to run a diagnostic program to help us narrow it down.

At any rate, I'm starting to think it's not any ONE app that is causing the problem. I think it may be that Microsoft made some changes to the APIs and sometimes an app either crashes or doesn't shutdown properly and goes into Ninja mode.

Yeah, I no longer think it was any one app, but something in the OS that isn't shutting down processes that we think we exited. I think I noticed the problem start two updates ago under the 8.1 preview. I'm hoping they come out with another update for it soon. I'm not sure, but I think it seems to be mostly the Icon with this problem, at least from what I've read (though with school, I haven't spent as much time on here as I used to), but I know it isn't completely an Icon problem, because as Eric said above, his 8x is doing something similar.

Yes, it sure would be nice to have schematics and the like. Or a tool to tell us what processes are actively running. Generally, I don't believe this is necessary for WP, since it was designed as it was to not have processes running in the background, but for times like this when there is a bug and you're trying to figure it out, it sure would be nice. Meltdown mode is something I like to avoid, having operated a nuclear power plant (and slept less than 100 feet from it). :wink:

 

[Arlen Nichols]

I'm having the exact same problem. My Icon gets extremely hot, really hot, then becomes unresponsive forcing a restart. This issue never happened until I installed the Developer preview about a week ago.