ANR when screen turns off, BroadcastReceiver related issue

Question

The application I am working on, works correctly when the screen is on, and for any length of time, but as soon as the phone goes to sleep and 10 seconds have elapsed, I get an error in my logcat,

I/art Thread[5,tid=318,WaitingInMainSignalCatcherLoop,Thread*=0xaf60e400,peer=0x12c00080,"Signal Catcher"]: reacting to signal 3

I pulled the traces file and tried to understand what was causing this issue and read through androids page on application performance, I have figured out that, it is being caused because a BroadcastReceiver hasn't executed in 10 seconds,

A BroadcastReceiver hasn't finished executing within 10 seconds.

From reading the traces file, I believe it has something to do with the timeout of the screen being broadcast and the action not being completed.

"ActivityManager" prio=5 tid=16 TimedWaiting
 | group="main" sCount=1 dsCount=0 obj=0x12d41970 self=0xac884400
 | sysTid=859 nice=-2 cgrp=apps sched=0/0 handle=0xb50e9e80
 | state=S schedstat=( 443987410679 259509083288 699634 ) utm=18416 stm=25982 core=2 HZ=100
 | stack=0xa14fa000-0xa14fc000 stackSize=1036KB
 | held mutexes=
 at java.lang.Object.wait!(Native method)
 - waiting on <0x03423764> (a com.android.server.am.ActivityManagerService$6)
 at java.lang.Object.wait(Object.java:422)
 at com.android.server.am.ActivityManagerService.dumpStackTraces(ActivityManagerService.java:4969)
 - locked <0x03423764> (a com.android.server.am.ActivityManagerService$6)
 at com.android.server.am.ActivityManagerService.dumpStackTraces(ActivityManagerService.java:4946)
 at com.android.server.am.ActivityManagerService.appNotResponding(ActivityManagerService.java:5187)
 at com.android.server.am.BroadcastQueue$AppNotResponding.run(BroadcastQueue.java:171)
 at android.os.Handler.handleCallback(Handler.java:739)
 at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:95)
 at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:135)
 at android.os.HandlerThread.run(HandlerThread.java:61)
 at com.android.server.ServiceThread.run(ServiceThread.java:46)

Can someone please point me in the right direction to resolve this issue? How can I find the root cause of the issue.

What I had tried (in my ignorance) I tried removing all the Broadcast Receivers in the code, that didn't help., obviously. I got rid of the wakeLocks in an attempt to resolve the issue, but that also didn't help.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I'm having the same problem here with an operation that should not take so much time, but for some reason, it is.

From the official Android Documentation:

The specific constraint on BroadcastReceiver execution time emphasizes what broadcast receivers are meant to do: small, discrete amounts of work in the background such as saving a setting or registering a Notification. So as with other methods called in the UI thread, applications should avoid potentially long-running operations or calculations in a broadcast receiver. But instead of doing intensive tasks via worker threads, your application should start an IntentService if a potentially long running action needs to be taken in response to an intent broadcast .

http://developer.android.com/training/articles/perf-anr.html