Troubleshooting Battery Drain Issues

Products

• TouchDown

Issue/Introduction

 

Resolution

The first thing we suggest is reducing the Emails to Synchronize option to 2 weeks and Appointments to Synchronize to 2 weeks. Anything 30 days or more will result in downloading ALL items on the server and then deleting up to the setting you have set. Causing a major battery drain in most cases.

More battery concerns below:

Please note: The "Spare parts" application that reports battery usage is rarely accurate in regards to TouchDown's usage of power. Here's our suggestions on how to use TouchDown as efficiently as possible:

Set your connection mode to "ActiveSync only" and receive emails as they arrive. This way, TouchDown will not be constantly asking for new items. Instead, the server will report to TouchDown whenever there is a new message or change to your data. This is the magic of ActiveSync (yay Microsoft!).

In the absence of Push Email, the other way to retrieve emails from the server is to have the program check periodically for emails. To enable this periodic checking, you must check ON the "Automatically check for emails" box and then make sure you have the desired polling interval set beneath it. An ideal value for this is 15 minutes. Smaller polling intervals can increase your battery drain. This entry specifies the interval at which touchdown will query the server for changes in the selected folders. This is specified in minutes. Setting too low a value here can have an adverse effect on battery life. 15 minutes has been found to be a good tradeoff.

About constant refreshes

Some users face the problem of TouchDown looping to perform refreshes, resulting in a higher battery drain and slower operations.
This can also result in touchdown displaying the message "Push Throttled, too many timeouts in 1 minute".

The following are the reasons we have found for this occurrence:

• Your server is down or unreachable

If your server is not reachable by TouchDown, it attempts to connect repeatedly. However, if it tries and fails 5 times or more in a given minute, it gives up and waits for about 8 minutes before trying again.

• Your server returns an error when touchdown connects

When TouchDown attempts to connect to the server for push notifications, there are some situations where sever misconfiguration can cause the attempt to fail. If TouchDown fails to connect for some reason, it will reattempt a few times, and then throttle itself for about 8 minutes.

• Your server is constantly telling TouchDown there are changes waiting

In some cases, if your server has an Antivirus installed on it, and if the Antivirus has not been configured properly to exclude certain exchange folders from scanning, this can happen, and TouchDown will constantly think there are changes and try to sync these changes. If it happens more than about 5 times a minute, it will throttle itself.

• Certain issues with corrupted messages in exchange 2003 server in HTML mode (THIS CAN AFFECT BATTERY LIFE)

Sometimes certain types of messages seem to be generating inconsistent messages in exchange 2003 in activesync. The typical symptom would be EXTREME sluggishness. Here is a workaround for that:

1. First Disable push
2. Kill touchdown application (you can use any task manager to do this, go to Android settings/Applications/Manage applications/TouchDown and click Force Stop button, or you can simply reboot the device)
3. In the third tab of touchdown settings, uncheck the "Enable HTML" option and save settings
4. Enable push back on again.

Hopefully this offers you some insight to your problems with power usage and the most efficient way to use our application.