High CPU usage on Sony Xperia Arc with Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0

After I upgraded my Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc from 2.3.4 (GingerBread) to 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich), I noticed that it was laggy and slow.

With Gingerbread 2.3.4, and ADW Launcher as the home screen, everything was fine.

Upon using the "top" command, either from ConnectBot, or from adb via the USB case, I noticed that com.google.media and com.google.acore are eating up most of the CPU time.

You can also go into Settings Developer Options and turn on the CPU overlay which will tell you the top processes eating up CPU.

Searching Google for the com.google.media, the advice was to search /mnt/sdcard/media/audio/ for ringtones and delete them. I did not have any ringtones there, but did have one notification for facebook. I deleted it, and it helped a bit.

After that com.google.media continued to eat CPU time.

Only after I killed Xperia Gallery using Automatic Task Killer (ATK) did the phone go back to normal, and neither com.google.acore nor .media were eating up CPU.

Here is the output of top -n 7, either from adb shell or from ConnectBot.

While com.google.media is eating CPU:

User 55%, System 12%, IOW 32%, IRQ 0%
User 56 + Nice 116 + Sys 38 + Idle 0 + IOW 100 + IRQ 0 + SIRQ 0 = 310
  PID PR CPU% S  #THR     VSS     RSS PCY UID      Name
  456  0  44% S    16 292200K  17956K  bg app_26   android.process.media
 2456  0  11% S    23 295108K  14484K  bg app_87   com.sonyericsson.gallery
  310  0   4% S    76 390468K  35008K  fg system   system_server
 3403  0   1% R     1    924K    448K  fg shell    top
  114  0   0% S     1      0K      0K  fg root     yaffs-bg-1
  140  0   0% S     3  28024K   1192K  fg drm      /system/bin/drmserver
  111  0   0% D     1      0K      0K  fg root     mmcqd

While both com.google.acore and com.google.acore is eating CPU:

User 83%, System 10%, IOW 6%, IRQ 0%
User 40 + Nice 214 + Sys 33 + Idle 0 + IOW 19 + IRQ 0 + SIRQ 0 = 306

  PID PR CPU% S  #THR     VSS     RSS PCY UID      Name
  612  0  29% S    17 297168K  21596K  bg app_23   android.process.acore
  456  0  28% S    16 292200K  18064K  bg app_26   android.process.media
 3132  0  24% S    21 299632K  30064K  bg app_23   com.sonyericsson.android.socialphonebook
 2456  0   3% S    16 287828K  15000K  bg app_87   com.sonyericsson.gallery
  310  0   2% S    76 390468K  37596K  fg system   system_server
 2670  0   1% S    10 286736K  38716K  fg app_11   android.process.acore
 3203  0   1% R     1    924K    448K  fg shell    top

After com.google.acore stops eating CPU, the output was

User 0%, System 2%, IOW 0%, IRQ 0%
User 1 + Nice 0 + Sys 9 + Idle 296 + IOW 0 + IRQ 0 + SIRQ 0 = 306

  PID PR CPU% S  #THR     VSS     RSS PCY UID      Name
 5614  0   1% R     1    928K    460K  fg shell    top
  393  0   1% S    12 291432K  25576K  fg system   com.android.systemui
    3  0   0% S     1      0K      0K  fg root     ksoftirqd/0
    4  0   0% S     1      0K      0K  fg root     events/0
    5  0   0% S     1      0K      0K  fg root     khelper
    6  0   0% S     1      0K      0K  fg root     async/mgr
    7  0   0% S     1      0K      0K  fg root     suspend

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