Is my iPhone 5S draining battery too fast (and is it due to process mediaServerD?)

Question

My iPhone 5s has always had less good battery life than my previous iPhone (4S), but I'd always assumed that it was due to the increased speed of the CPU/GPU and the increased screen size. It also sometimes seems warm in my pocket (not hot - but warmer than I would expect it to be in the ambient temperature.)

This article: http://www.overthought.org/blog/2014/the-ultimate-guide-to-solving-ios-battery-drain Has been very popular in the last week, and I read it. Something I had never done before was to check the usage stats. See also the second from last paragraph here: https://www.apple.com/uk/batteries/iphone.html

It appears that my phone never sleeps. The standby (usage+standby) figure is always the same as the usage figure. I assume that this is not normal.

The other day it ran down from full charge to almost empty in 7 hours. As you can see from this screenshot: Is that normal battery life?

Yesterday I ran Activity Monitor in Instruments on the phone when it was connected to my Mac - nothing seemed to be taking-up ridiculous CPU time, but I did notice that a process named mediaserverd was always at the top of the CPU chart - and always consuming 6% of CPU. I assume that it was designed to be permanently running, but I doubt that it's meant to be that power hungry.

Please could someone else with a 5S run Activity Monitor in Instruments on their phone and let me know if the process is just as hungry on their phone.

Thanks.

Answer 1

It looks like a bug in mediaserverd. Upon rebooting the phone the process returns to sane CPU use. I have filed a Radar.

Answer 2

I had the same problem with my iPhone losing battery life like crazy and the Usage and the Standby time matching identically. I went into Settings => General => Reset => Reset All Settings. It cleaned out the garbage that was causing this and now I've got significantly better battery life and the Usage and Standby times are more varied. Backup your phone and then try this and give it few hours to see if you notice a difference. If not, you can always go back to your backup.

Answer 3

I had the same problem with my jailbroken iPhone 5s. After researching what might create a problem, I found that tweak virtual home was the problem. Not fully tweak, but option ENABLE QUICK UNLOCK which is used to unlock your device without the need to wake up device first. All others options work perfectly.

Now the standby and usage time are no more equal.

Answer 4

I had a similar problem with my iPhone 5s and my wife's iPhone 5. The standby time and usage time were the same, indicating that the devices never went to sleep.

I hooked my 5s to Xcode's Instruments and found in my case the top 3 CPU hungry processes were CommCenter, locationd and backboardd; after ruling out Instruments's own DTmobileIS. The usage was low, less than 2%. Also the problem didn't go away by rebooting the device.

But I found something very interesting in Xcode's device logs:

Incident Identifier: 941F209C-EC9B-49B8-B796-F9B07543E9ED
CrashReporter Key:   182e9824ae5047b9b2f2fe5e88777bc89fd945ec
Date:                2014-04-19 02:48:06 -0300
OS Version:          iPhone OS 7.1 (11D167)

locationd: com.apple.locationd.NetworkProvider.15fd3dec0    NoIdleSleepAssertion == 255, held for 00:00:03
backboardd: quicklookd[204]-com.apple.mediaremoted.relayxpcmessage [0x17826f4c0]
    NoIdleSleepAssertion == 255, held for 00:00:06
backboardd: Music[285]-com.apple.mediaremote.sendremotecommand [0x17007e380]
    NoIdleSleepAssertion == 255, held for 00:00:06
backboardd: Skype[129]-Called by Skype, from unknown method [0x1702708c0]
    NoIdleSleepAssertion == 255, held for 00:02:32
backboardd: BriaVoip[132]-132 [0x17026e780]
    NoIdleSleepAssertion == 255, held for 11:01:09
SpringBoard: com.apple.springboard.idle
    NoIdleSleepAssertion == 255, held for 00:00:17
dataaccessd: com.apple.persistentconnection[dataaccessd,100,2B8234AA-88C3-4010-BEED-C4C6DB1FC7BC-PendingSimpleTimer(0x1310cb150)]
    NoIdleSleepAssertion == 255, held for 00:00:04
apsd: com.apple.apsd-outgoingmessage
    NoIdleSleepAssertion == 255, held for 00:00:03
mediaserverd: com.apple.audio.pid-16.keypress.isprewarmed
    NoIdleSleepAssertion == 255, held for 00:00:06
mediaserverd: com.apple.audio.VAD Aggregate Device UID 15.isrunning
    NoIdleSleepAssertion == 255, held for 05:35:14
mediaserverd: com.apple.audio.AudioSession-132(com.counterpath.bv).isplaying
    NoIdleSleepAssertion == 255, held for 09:42:08

Hardware Model: N51AP
Awake Time: 27:14:44 (98084)
Standby Time: 27:14:44 (98084)
Partial Charge: 1
Capacity: 0
Voltage: 3370 mV

So it seemed that Bria (a VOIP soft phone) was preventing the phone from sleeping for 11 hours, and it was playing a sound for almost 10 hours, in top of that. I force quit the app and the phone started to enter standby mode normally.

I don't know when these reports are generated, but they are great to solve iOS battery issues.

Answer 5

mediaserverd stays at around 1% cpu on my 5s. If it's staying higher, it's most likely an app playing something in the background, perhaps when it shouldn't be.