Do batteries drain faster on Firewalla networks?
I have been noticing my Google Pixel XL's battery draining very quickly for some time and I assumed it was the phone itself. However, after I accidentally left my phone connected to my IoT wifi network (not protected by Firewalla) one day, my battery life improved dramatically. After switching back to my normal home wifi network (protected by Firewalla), it drained quickly again.
Using wireshark, I see that the Firewalla is constantly sending ARP broadcasts as part of its ARP poisoning mechanism. I wonder if this could be having a side effect of making devices use more energy as they never get a chance to idle. Is anyone else noticing fast battery drain on their Firewalla-protected neetworks?
-
In theory, ARP packets should not wake up your phone. So far we have not seen this happen.
But, about 2 years ago, we did have an Android bug where the Firewalla iOS app had a thread that never finishes ... that was fixed 2 years ago as well.
1. Are you running the firewalla app on the pixel? if you are try to kill it and see if it fixes the problem.
2. Change the Google Pixel to unmonitored (under devices) and see if you have the same problem.
3. Lastly tap on + and make sure port scan is off for LAN.
-
I noticed the same thing when I installed my Blue Plus on my network. All battery powered Android phones and tablets saw a significant drop in battery life. At first I thought it was the Firewalla app on my phone, but that app is not on the tablet and work phone. After making those devices unmonitored battery life went back to normal, so it was not the app itself, but the monitoring part.
I would love to have a solution for this because I would like to turn monitoring back on for these devices. Would this be any different in DHCP mode? -
Tap on + and see if the "Device Port Scan" is active or not, that's a deeper scan of devices, not sure it will wake up the OS. If you don't have that on (if you have that on, turn it off), please let us know the Android device versions you have, we spend a lot of time on this topic, and so far we have not seen one battery drain due to monitoring mode. So we are curious about your particular problem.
-
The "Device Port Scan" was on. I will turn that off and turn monitoring back on and keep an eye on battery life. The devices are all on the latest android updates (Samsung S10E, Tab A7, Pixel 2XL and Pixel 3a XL).
I don't remember turning the Device Port Scan on. Is that on by default or did I turn that on in my initial playing around after installation?
Thanks.
-
I know it's been a while, but after I turned the device port scan off, it seemed to be a bit better. But there is still a noticeable reduction in battery life for my Android devices when monitoring in simple mode is turned on.
My work phone is sitting mostly idle on my desk and only gets used for some two-factor authorizations. This phone easily goes 4-5 days without charging. My Samsung tablet gets used occasionally, but is otherwise mostly idle. This lasts well over a week (probably 8-10 days of idle) on a charge. My personal phone gets a lot more use but typically lasts about a day and a half on a charge. This is with monitoring for these devices turned off.
With monitoring turned on (but device port-scan off) I didn't notice the extra drain much on my personal phone because it is active more often, but I did notice that it was down to about 25% by the end of day, while it is otherwise around 40-50% when I put it on the charger at night. The difference was much more dramatic on the devices that are mostly idle. The Samsung tablet battery was dead within 3 days, while the work phone started battery conservation after 2 days.
I turned monitoring back off and the battery life returned to normal. All devices are on their latest updates. Work phone (Samsung) is Android 9, Samsung tablet is Android 10, and personal Pixel phone is Android 11.
I can live without the personal battery operated devices being monitored until I have time to setup the DHCP configuration, so it's not a big issue for me now that I now what is triggering it. I just wanted to provide an extra data point.
-
Is the problem appears to happen more often with Samsung? One theory is this feature in some android phones wlan_rx_wake; You can try to setup a static IP on your phones and see if it will make much difference. Will ask our android developers to look at this and see if they can get their hands on a Samsung phone.
-
I confirm the battery fast consumption (8 h instead of 2 days without usage) on Motorola G5 (one with firewalla app, the other one without) in Basic mode (ARP).
A go back on 4G stop the fast consumption.
I disabled "device scan" on phone group, it's perhaps a little bit better but not significative.
I disabled "stop minitoring" on phone group and solve the trouble. -
@christophe, will it be possible to switch the firewalla to dhcp mode and see if it will be better? When in simple mode, arp spoofing is getting sent out to the phones, and we do know some phones may wake up and process this packet (while many don't). Want to see if this is the case.
Yes, the device scan's will also send packets to the devices. (some will ignore these packets if they are sleeping, and some phones don't)
-
Wow, I just found this article buried deep into the forum after I ran into this issue without even realizing it was there. I was wondering why *all* of our mobile Android devices (Pixel/Samsung/Xiaomi) had their battery life cut in half recently. I even blamed Google for some problematic update but could not find any evidence of that from others.
Especially my Mi Pad 4 tablet with LineageOS 18 suffered: from up to 15 days standby to only 3 days tops! That's crazy!
That's one serious drawback that really should be mentioned clearly for Simple mode! And I really like the simplicity of Simple mode on my Blue: plug it in and done! :(
Is there any chance that this might get fixed/tuned to an acceptable degree? I'm wondering if the Circle also suffers from this?
-
So glad I stumbled on this. I've had the same issue with a Samsung Galaxy S9 and a Samsung Tab S6. If i turn the S9 wifi off, the phone will last for 2-3 days of mostly standby (it's a work phone with minimal use). However, with wifi on it dies in less than a day even just sitting in standby. On the Tab S6 I even built a Tasker routine to turn off wifi when I put the tablet in standby because it was dying so fast with wifi on. I never associated it with Firewalla, but now it makes a lot of sense. These devices never have battery problems when I'm traveling and/or on someone else's wifi network.
Btw, my personal phone is an iPhone 13 Pro that gets a lot of use and regularly goes for 2 days between charges, so I don't think it's impacted by this.
-
Ok, just circling back on this, I've run some tests and I'm convinced that the battery drain is specific to simple mode, and solved by DHCP mode. Following are my findings using a Samsung Tab S6 (wifi only) and a Firewalla Blue. The tests are with the tablet idle (in standby, cover closed, only woken to check battery every few hours). This is a device that I've struggled with battery for mysterious reasons for over a year, not realizing until this week that Firewalla might have something to do with it. Battery would drain fast with wifi enabled even during long periods of idle. But disabling wifi would solve the problem, and also moving to a different wifi network (on the road, etc) would also solve the problem.
Here are my findings with the Samsung Tab S6, starting at a nearly full charge (99%):
Test 1: Firewalla disconnected from home network for 19 hours. Samsung Tab S6 battery dropped from 99% to 97%, which is less than .2% per hour.
Test 2: FIrewalls connected and running in Simple mode for 13 hours: Battery dropped from 97% to 80%, which is roughly 1.3% per hour.
Test 3: Firewalla reconfigured to DHCP mode (disabled DHCP at router, cycled wifi on Tab to gain new IP address from Firewalla, confirmed online and monitored) for 10 hours: Battery dropped from 80% to 78%, which is .2% per hour.
I think this is fairly conclusive that Simple mode causes battery drain on certain mobile devices (using ~6x more battery at idle), and DHCP mode solves it.
Notes: The problems I've observed seem specific to Android and possibly only Samsung. I definitely observed this behavior in two Samsung devices (this Tab S6, as well as a Galaxy S9 phone). I also had a Google Pixel 3 that was having some battery issues, but it was old and well-used and I'm not convinced the problem was caused by Firewalla (maybe, maybe not, I'm not going to unearth that thing and test it). I'm now on an IPhone 13 Pro and the battery life has been excellent.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
15 comments