4s with ios8 - battery drain issue - possible clue?

Question

I am one of the 4s users who is experiencing significantly accelerated battery drain since upgrading to ios 8.0 the first day it was released.  My battery will drain from %100 to less than %50 in less than two hours with typical light use.  Previously on ios 7.x I could go all day and be only down to %70 or so.  The way it's working now I won't make it through a day at work without having to recharge.
I have tried optimizing in all the ways suggested in other threads (like turning off background apps etc.) and as far as I can tell my battery usage should be no worse (and presumably better since attention was given in ios 8.0 to making battery use better) than it was in ios 7.x.
However, I'm wondering if this is causing my battery drain:
In Settings->Privacy->Diagnostics & Usage->Diagnostic & Usage Data:
There is a long list of "stacks+backboardd-2014-09-22-1..." files.  Yesterday (22nd) there were eight (8) of these rather large files created.  Today, on the 23rd, I'm up to three, when I looked this morning, there was just one.  Each file is rather massive, so something is burning a fair bit of energy triggering the debugging diagnostics tool to create and store these files.  (I'm guessing).
Here's an example of the contents of one of them (just the head of the file, as I say, they are massive):
{"os_version":"iPhone OS 8.0 (12A365)","bug_type":"188"}
  Incident Identifier: BDD2D474-CDCF-4409-8A16-732C2D22EF06
  CrashReporter Key:   f14750a09f7499f2bd4c6b15297406f27dc09a69
  Hardware Model:      iPhone4,1
  OS Version:          iPhone OS 8.0 (12A365)
  Kernel version:      Darwin Kernel Version 14.0.0: Tue Aug 19 15:08:02 PDT 2014; root:xnu-2783.1.72~8/RELEASE_ARM_S5L8940X
  Date:                2014-09-23 13:08:17 -0500
  Exception Code:      0xfaded322
  Reason:              Watchdog: Thermal not updating, backboardd 20.002234s last successful ping: 270b50 269f9fd0ce63 269r1d77000 200m0/1 200nffffffff 0m10004003/1 0u0 0n1
  Thermal data unavailable
  Frontmost process PID:    43
  Stackshot trace buffer size too small, trying again with 524288 bytes.
  Jetsam Level:              0
  Free Pages:              797
  Active Pages:          41652
  Inactive Pages:        18292
  Purgeable Pages:          71
  Wired Pages:           23313
  Speculative Pages:     20591
  Throttled Pages:       24377
  File-backed Pages:     67840
  Compressions:              0
  Decompressions:            0
  Compressor Size:           0
  Busy Buffer Count:         0
  Pages Wanted:            533
  Pages Reclaimed:           0
  Process 0 info:
          resident memory bytes:  64299008
          page faults:                3789
          page-ins:                      0
          copy-on-write faults:          0
          times throttled:               0
          times did throttle:            0
          user   time in task:          25.616464 seconds
          system time in task:           0.000000 seconds
  Process 0 kernel_task threads:
  thread 0x65 TH_WAIT|TH_UNINT 0x803e35a8
          thread priority:               92
          Base thread priority:          92
          thread sched flags:     none
          kernel cont: 0x8007ea05
          user   time in thread:     1.234561 seconds
          system time in thread:     0.000000 seconds
  thread 0x66 TH_RUN|TH_IDLE 0
          thread priority:                0
          Base thread priority:           0
          thread sched flags:     none
          kernel cont: 0x800294e5
          user   time in thread:     6.564943 seconds
          system time in thread:     0.000000 seconds
  thread 0x67 TH_WAIT|TH_UNINT 0x8002574d
          thread priority:               95
          Base thread priority:          95
          thread sched flags:     none
          kernel cont: 0x8002574d
          user   time in thread:     0.027250 seconds
          system time in thread:     0.000000 seconds
...etc...
Anyway, just wondering if this might be related to why my phone's batter life has plummeted.  Also, does anyone have any insight as to what this file is actually telling us?  I'm happy to send diagnostics to Apple if it will help them get to the bottom of this issue that seems to be plaguing other 4s users.
Thanks!
James Rowell.

Answer 1

I just wanted to post a small follow up. During my recent attempts to debug my battery issues, I rebooted the iPhone.  I don't think my phone had been rebooted since I did the upgrade and started experiencing these battery issues.  At any rate, since rebooting I have seen my battery use return to much more acceptable and expected rates of idle/usage times.
Try rebooting your phone to see if it helps!  I wonder if it's just this simple for the folks who have been experiencing similar problems?!
Good luck all.