Android :: Service Seems To Sleep When Phone Is Inactive

I've written a test service to understand how android implements a service. I believe I understand the difference between Context.startService and Context.bindService. If I am not mistaken, Context.startService will tell android to keep this service running, even after the Activity that started it has ended.

While testing the service, I have come across something interesting.

My problem is that the service appears to sleep or pause for a few hours, run a short time, and then sleep for a few more hours, then run a short time, etc when the phone has become inactive. In other words, when I am doing things on the phone the service is doing what is is supposed to. But after I have finished doing things on the phone and the screen goes blank the service appears to sleep or pause. I don't know if I have implemented the service wrong or if this is how Android services work.

The test service I have written simply sets a postDelayed handler to increment++ a variable in the Runnable every minute, and then write the value of that variable and a timestamp to a file (log.txt) on the sd card. This how I know that the service appears to sleep. Because there are gaps in the timestamp that correspond to when the phone was inactive. If the service were truly active the whole time, there should be a line item in the log.txt file every minute.

From the log.txt file below you can see that over an eleven hour period there are only 36 line items with time stamps ranging from 10:27 PM through 9:23 AM. If the service was running and active the whole time there should be over 600 lines in the text file. The phone was on AC power the whole time so Android should not have tried to stop services due to power issues. The phone was not used or touched from about midnight to 9 the next morning, so there should not have been a low resource clean up.

I have spent several days looking for an answer and everything I can find seems to validate that when a service is started and not bound, it will stay running (http://code.google.com/android/reference/android/ app/Service.html). However, it appears it does not. Unless I have completely missed the ball on this.

I have included the service.java and activity.java as well as the log file.

Here is a sample log.txt

CODE:...............

Here is the service java file:

Java:

CODE:....................