reducing power usage of Fedora - how you can help!

[Paul Johnson]

On 8/9/07, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> Paul Johnson (pauljohn32 at gmail.com) said:
> > Wakeups-from-idle per second : 708.6
> > no ACPI power usage estimate available
> >
> > Top causes for wakeups:
>
> Ouch. What are you doing with firefox when this is happening? Also,
> that's a lot of timeouts for a terminal emulator.
>

I think gmail is the problem.  After starting firefox, before going to
gmail, the powertop output is not weird.


Top causes for wakeups:
  31.4% (131.4)       <interrupt> : i8042
  14.5% ( 60.5)       <interrupt> : nvidia
  13.3% ( 55.6)            mlterm : schedule_timeout (process_timeout)
   8.1% ( 34.0)              Xorg : schedule_timeout (process_timeout)
   7.7% ( 32.0)       S06cpuspeed : queue_delayed_work_on (delayed_work_timer_fn
   7.1% ( 29.5)       <interrupt> : extra timer interrupt

After going to may gmail account, where I read this email list, look what I see:


  28.2% (183.0)       firefox-bin : schedule_timeout (process_timeout)
  15.6% (101.7)       <interrupt> : i8042
   9.3% ( 60.7)       <interrupt> : nvidia
   9.2% ( 59.7)            mlterm : schedule_timeout (process_timeout)
   7.6% ( 49.7)       S06cpuspeed : queue_delayed_work_on (delayed_work_timer_fn
   6.7% ( 43.7)              Xorg : schedule_timeout (process_timeout)
   6.2% ( 40.0)       <interrupt> : ipw3945
   5.2% ( 33.7)       <interrupt> : extra timer interrupt
   4.5% ( 29.0)              Xorg : do_setitimer (it_real_fn)

The mlterm checks, well, I can't explain them.  I use mlterm because
it is the only unicode-ready terminal program that I can find that
allows me to set scalable images on the background from the command
line.  Since gnome-terminal removed the pixmap option from the cli, I
don't use it.  If anybody has a suggestion there, I'd switch.  Eterm
does not support unicode.



-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas