Spotlight's Impact on PowerBook Battery Life?

Viltvodlian Deoderan asks: "So, Spotlight for Mac OS X Tiger is very cool. I can now let my innate ability to disorganize things shine through. However, when using my PowerBook unplugged, it seems that my battery lasts a noticeably less time. A close reading of Ars Technica's description of how spotlight works suggests that this is due to keeping the index file up-to-date on disk. Has anyone else noticed the same thing? Does someone have a better explanation for why my battery seems to drain out, prematurely? Is there some way real-time indexing can be turned off to conserve power?"

Comments

Kill unused processes

[tonsofpcs]

You can use kill and kill any processes that you are not using, close any applications you aren't using, kill any drivers that aren't needed.

Re:Kill unused processes

[Anonymous Coward]

The same trick works with people!

Re:Kill unused processes

[Mikey-San]

Use /sbin/kextunload to remove kernel extensions (what drivers in OS X tend to be) that are in memory, not kill.

you$ man kextunload

Re:Kill unused processes

[Alan Partridge]

mod up, surely?

Umm..

[imstanny]

Try turning off the pr0n. you're welcome.

Re:Umm..

[steven.hasty]

Safeguarding your porn collection using encrypted disk images: "Hiding such things from Spotlight is a good idea. To do that, you can create an encrypted disk image that is password protected to keep nosy users out, and the contents of the image don't appear in Spotlight unless the image is mounted...."

Re:Umm..

[keith.gillum]

Heh hehhehheheheh he
he said...mounted
Yeah, heh hehheh hehehe mounted....

Re:Umm..

[TeamSPAM]

You could do that, but then you couldn't do a spotlight search on your porn collection to find fetish your currently interest in. ie, latex, corset, Suze Randall.

Re:Umm..

[dmarcoot]

and easier way is simply to drag it so spotlights privacy prefs. done. if your admin, lock down the control panel. its that easy

What do you consider an average load?

[andrewski]

Depending on the time of day and what you are doing with your computer, power consumption varies a lot. It'd be difficult to even establish a reliable baseline usage time per charge.

After you install, files are indexed as they are written. It really takes very cpu time or other resources to do this. If you don't believe me do some performance profiling.

If you did an upgrade install, you are already working with a sorely fragmented disk. Additionally, batteries age. Maybe it's these two factors that are causing your batteries to seem like they are giving out early.

Re:What do you consider an average load?

[cei]

Depending on the time of day and what you are doing with your computer, power consumption varies a lot.

Thank Bush that we'll have longer Daylight Saving Time next year so that our Powerbook batteries will last longer.

oh, come on...someone had to say it. B^]

Re:What do you consider an average load?

[theWrkncacnter]

Thank Bush that we'll have longer Daylight Saving Time next year so that our Powerbook batteries will last longer.

Well, no one said it because it's not true. You may want to look into that one again.

Re:What do you consider an average load?

[TheRaven64]

Every time you modify a file, it is re-indexed. If you are downloading a lot of files, or touching a lot of files, then it is a good idea to add the folder containing them to the privacy list in the Spotlight settings in System Preferences. I have ~/tmp set to ignore, and I do anything here that I don't mind not being indexed. Although considering how rarely I use Spotlight, I should probably add a lot more...

Re:What do you consider an average load?

[Kalak]

OK, thinking this is a great idea, I went to do it, but the @#$@ file interface won't let me. So how did you manage this? editing prefs manually? some plist?

Re:What do you consider an average load?

[Jord]

1. Open spotlight preferences, select privacy tab
2. Open finder window
3. Select go to folder in the finder menu
4. Type /tmp
5. Drag tmp folder to privacy list in spotlight preferences tab.
6. profit!

Re:What do you consider an average load?

[azav]

I trust this removes your safari cache from snotlight?

If it doesn't what would?

TIA

Re:What do you consider an average load?

[Jord]

No, Safari caches at ~/Library/Caches/Safari

You would need to add that one as well.

Re:What do you consider an average load?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno about you, but I usually produce about 15ml.

Re:What do you consider an average load?

[Kalak]

I thought that was supposed to be the method, but it seems I have something fubar somewhere - dragging folders there isn't working at all. Time to troubleshoot my install then. Thanks for confirming the method.

Too bad my battery blows

[MyDixieWrecked]

I actually noticed that my battery is lasting much, much less time, lately, but I've been attributing that to the fact that it's almost 3 years old and hasn't had the life that it used to when it was young.

I wish there was a way of disabling spotlight during certain times. especially when I'm running a script that's creating dozens of files only to trash them again later. I think it's taking a bit of a performance hit from spotlight.

Re:Too bad my battery blows

[Anonymous Coward]

if you're using carbon, set the kioFCBTemporaryFileBit bit in the ioFCBFlags parameter. That will prevent indexing.

Re:Too bad my battery blows

[justMichael]

I wish there was a way of disabling spotlight during certain times. especially when I'm running a script that's creating dozens of files only to trash them again later. I think it's taking a bit of a performance hit from spotlight.

Assuming your script always creates it's files in the same location, add that location to the privacy tab in Spotlight prefs. It should then ignore that directory.

Here's some more info

Re:Too bad my battery blows

[Mikey-San]

What if his script is deployed on machines he has no direct control over? (Say, he's writing the script for people to download.)

Original poster: I'm not sure what the purpose of your script is, but if you can, create a temporary folder called "MyScriptFiles.noindex" and write your temp files to that instead. Folders with a ".noindex" suffix don't get indexed by SpotDark.

Re:Too bad my battery blows

[bkocik]

Folders with a ".noindex" suffix don't get indexed by SpotDark.

SpotDark? Wow, that's clever.

Okay, not really.

Spotlight? Could be anything

[topham]

Spotlight doesn't do that much work that I would honestly expect it to significantly impact battery life.

Perhaps if you used spotlight to find all your files, as it would take some effort to search the index and list all the files. But I doubt you search for that many files in a session.

It is far more likely there is another process which is effecting battery life, or your battery is starting to show some wear and tear.

Re:Spotlight? Could be anything

[ciroknight]

No, I've experienced this too with a quite new iBook. Before Tiger I'd get battery life of just under 6 hours. Afterwards I'm lucky to get 5.

I believe it's correctly attributed to Spotlight, as every now and again, even when the machine is sitting plugged in and resting on my kitchen counter, I can hear it whirl it's harddisk as if it's indexing.

I would like a control panel applet to tune Spotlight, but I can wait. I already did my part in the deal (gave them an email and a submission on their website).

And for the trolls of the world, Apple's not perfect either. This is the first time this kind of tool has been included in an operating system, and it's something that will take quite a bit of time to tune and work out correctly. To be honest, in all of my works to do something similar, I've came out with the same results to a much lower quality, and any tool I've seen to do the same will probably harm my battery's life even more.

Re:Spotlight? Could be anything

[yasth]

Actually it is not the first time it has been included in an operating system. Windows 2000 and XP both shipped with indexing, it just had a tragically broken unuseable UI (secret codes??? WTF?). The other option for a battery life decrease is just the normal feature creep, every OS release hurts a litle bit more, and takes a bit more cpu time, and a bit more bits flung around. Since cpu time and flinging bits around costs battery life one would expect a bit of a reduction. Eh just a thought.

really though apple isn't doing that bad, If they keep up at it they might get somewhere. (The trick is not to beat microsoft, but to keep beating microsoft, as microsoft is buffered against temporary insurections.)

Re:Spotlight? Could be anything

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it is not the first time it has been included in an operating system. Windows 2000 and XP both shipped with indexing, it just had a tragically broken unuseable UI

oh shove it. Spotlight is so much more than "indexing", and so much less than "just a GUI wrapper".

why is it that slashdorks feel so content to look down on a highly successful 25 year old multi-billion dollar company like it's a small child that "just might get somewhere"?

Re:Spotlight? Could be anything

[ActionGaz]

I believe it's correctly attributed to Spotlight, as every now and again, even when the machine is sitting plugged in and resting on my kitchen counter, I can hear it whirl it's harddisk as if it's indexing.

That's not how Spotlight works. When you first installed Tiger it needed to go through all the existing files and index them, but that process is surely done by now.

All it does now is respond to new files being created or files being changed. It doesn't need to scan for these as it is told directly by the operating system when the changes take place.

The constant disk access must be some other process.

Re:Spotlight? Could be anything

[gl4ss]

spotlight needs to acces hd.. ..which in turn needs to keep it spinning.

Re:Spotlight? Could be anything

[Anonymous Coward]

why is it that slashdorks feel so content to look down on a highly successful 25 year old multi-billion dollar company like it's a small child that "just might get somewhere"?

Because outside of a few niche markets it really hasn't in 25 years actually gotten anywhere? I mean it rocks in a field of Consumer Electronics, but computer wise, they go up in market share they go down in market share, they really don't go anywhere. Lately though they have begun to actually build the scafolding to allow them to actually take on Windows for realsy.

Re:Spotlight? Could be anything

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got an iBook with Tiger and I still get under 6 hours of battery life. However, I did turn off Dashboard (it seemed to be a resource hog and I couldn't figure out anything useful to do with it).

However, I am only using about 10 GBs of space on the hard drive, so that may have an impact.

Re:Spotlight? Could be anything

[keith.gillum]

Eh, sorry sport, but no dice. I was having the same issue and turned spotlight off. No more endlessley spinning hard disk. Check 'top' when your hard drive is running like mad....

Re:Spotlight? Could be anything

[Thomas2005]

I too have had trouble with battery life after installing Tiger. I was able to use my iBook for approximately 5 hours with Panther, but with Tiger, I am under 2 hours. At times I am tempted to get rid of Tiger and put Panther back on, but I am rarely away from an outlet and the features and updated applications that come with Tiger keep me from do it.

If Spotlight is to blame for the shortened battery life then Apple should provide levels of indexing to keep battery consumption at a minimum. At the very least there should be two levels where one indexes the file name only and one that does what it does right now.

To answer your question

[amichalo]

From here:
To turn indexing on or off for a volume, run sudo mdutil -i on volume name or sudo mdutil -i off volume name, respectively. For example, if you want to turn off indexing for a volume called Backup, the command would be sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/Backup .

Now to give you some grief about it:
This is pretty basic stuff - the less the hardware is used, the less power it will consume. If Spotlight, or any other app, is accessing the disk, then it will need power to do so. Likewise, if Spotlight is doing a bunch of searching through it's index that has to be loaded into RAM from the disk and those queries must be computed by the OS, then the disk and OS and RAM are all getting a workout.

What I recommend is that you check out what it is you are doing. If you are copy and moving files all over the place, or mounting and unmounting CDs, those processes would cause HD/CD usage as well as Spotlight indexing on top of that. Likewise, if you are doing a lot of Spotlight searching, there will be more usage because you are querying a DBMS.

Perhaps your battery is just coincidentally needed a replacement and/or non-spotlight related OS tweeks are changing power consumption.

Re:To answer your question

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Something like enabling / disabling indexing for specific drives/volumes should have been exposed in the preferences pane as such, not terminal commands.

On the other hand, while a tad less intuitive, you could go to the "privacy" tab in the spotlight preference pane and enter or drag volumes / folders and possibly files that you don't want indexed, drag them back out if you need them to be indexed.

Re:To answer your question

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pretty basic stuff - the less the hardware is used, the less power it will consume. If Spotlight, or any other app, is accessing the disk, then it will need power to do so. Likewise, if Spotlight is doing a bunch of searching through it's index that has to be loaded into RAM from the disk and those queries must be computed by the OS, then the disk and OS and RAM are all getting a workout.

What I recommend is that you check out what it is you are doing

What I recommend is that you read the Ars Technica article that the original poster linked to. The Spotlight indexer component is part of the kernel, and automatically maintains the search index database with all disk activity. Implicitly, this means that everything that used to involve one disk write operation will now involve at least an extra write and probably another seek & read, so you're at least doubling the amount of traffic going out to the disk.

It stands to reason that this would have a negative impact on battery life.

On the other hand, if this incrementally increased work is offset by not having to go searching across the whole disk every time you try to find something, then maybe you come out ahead anyway. And if the index is small enough to live in RAM -- probably not, but it seems possible -- then simple lookups may involve no disk access at all, if you're lucky. I have no idea if this is how it is implemented or how likely this is to work on the average laptop (512mb ram, how big is the index?), but it seems like a potentially big win for anyone that was already in the habit of doing a lot of searching.

Re:To answer your question

[Goo.cc]

One time I noticed was Spotlight causing me trouble was when compiling applications in my home directory. (I guess it was trying to keep up with the compiler as it created files.) I didn't want to turn off indexing on the whole volume, so I created a folder called "Src.noindex", as any folder with a .noindex extension is not indexed by Spotlight. This solved my problem.

It should be noted that although you can turn off the Spotlight service itself, using the above mentioned "sudo mdutil -i off /volname" is much better, as you will still be able to find things by filename. Turning off the Spotlight service disables finding completely, by content or filename.

Re:To answer your question

[TheRaven64]

You can disable indexing for a particular folder in System Preferences (the privacy tab in Spotlight settings). I have done this with ~/tmp for compiling etc.

Re:To answer your question

[bcwengerter]

It should be noted that although you can turn off the Spotlight service itself, using the above mentioned "sudo mdutil -i off /volname" is much better, as you will still be able to find things by filename. Turning off the Spotlight service disables finding completely, by content or filename.

Is this affected at all by use of FileVault?

For example df returns two filesystems: one mounted on "/" and one mounted on my home directory. The total space on each of them differs very slightly (by tens of 512-blocks) but also seems to represent the total space of the hard drive. (N.B.: I have not added any hard drives, nor have I changed the partitioning of the hard drive that came with this PowerBook.)

Say I want to turn off Spotlight for the drive. On which one should I run sudo mdutil -i off volname ?

Re:To answer your question

[discstickers]

I have had a problem with the privacy tab remembering not to index my Backup disk. Most times when I reboot, it's not there and the drive starts churning.

Re:To answer your question

[Goo.cc]

That is an interesting question. I seem to recall reading that FileVault is basically an encrypted sparse disk image, so I guess it would make sense that the mount point would be in your home directory. However, I also seem to remember that Spotlight does not index Disk Images. (Maybe a fellow Slashdotter could enlighten us?)

Does Spotlight find by content for you?

Re:To answer your question

[John Whitley]

What I recommend is that you check out what it is you are doing.

You blame the user's perception of a difference in battery life post OS upgrade to their usage habits? The user's work habits completely changed on an OS upgrade? I particularly like the implied solution that the user shouldn't do any work. Better: just turn it off and leave it plugged in at home. Lots of juice in the battery then.

Here's a clue: One big rule is to keep the hard drive spun down as much as possible. To this end, laptops and other portables use various strategies to defer disk accesses as long as possible (e.g. by caching writes in memory longer, etc). It's entirely reasonable to suspect that the additional disk interaction caused by Spotlight may reduce the OS' ability to defer and/or aggregate disk accesses. We already know that Spotlight itself has some warts (e.g. check out various Mac sites re: Spotlight and reindexing of large removable media drives.). It's very reasonable to suspect that the interaction between Spotlight and the system's ability to spin down disks hasn't been completely dialed in for laptop systems yet.

Re:To answer your question

[amichalo]

You blame the user's perception of a difference in battery life post OS upgrade to their usage habits? The user's work habits completely changed on an OS upgrade?

My usage habits have changed as OSes have been upgraded. I use Dashboard and Spotlight all the time now. Whereas before I used Apps like Calculator and Safari to hit maps.google.com, I have widgets. I don't browse all over my hard drive looking for files because I have "smart folders" from Spotlight.

Hell, even when I used Windows and Linux my useage changed when the OS was upgraded - You didn't do things differently from Win 3.1 to Win 95?

And no, I did NOT imply the shouldn't do any work. I stated that if they were doing drive intensive things, that would have an affect on the battery life. Perhaps since Tiger supports Quicktime H.264 the poster is now doing a lot of quicktime eidting.

Point is that *I* don't know and *you* don't know either.

For someone with such a low /. ID you surely seam more like a newbe flamer.

Re:To answer your question

[John Whitley]

My usage habits have changed as OSes have been upgraded. I use Dashboard and Spotlight all the time now.

Which is exactly what I didn't mean. The kinds of high-level tasks a user engages in are rather unlikely to have changed as a result of an OS upgrade alone. E.g. things such as "developing Ruby code", "playing music", or "working on a video project", etc. In your case, these are "doing arithmetic" and "checking a map". The apps involved should be irrelevant, especially in this case. Why? Because when you regard a system as a designed whole instead of "just a bunch of apps", then you can meaningfully talk about problems of the whole such as "my battery life tanked on upgrade". In this discussion, Dashboard or Spotlight, being parts of the designed whole (aka "the platform"), ideally shouldn't cause problems with power performance.

I stated that if they were doing drive intensive things, that would have an affect on the battery life.

Which, to spell it out, I ignored because it fails to give the benefit of the doubt regarding the original poster's intent -- that something seems to be causing a change in battery life BECAUSE of the upgrade. I like to think that they'd figure out that editing H.264 on a laptop would suck battery. The fan noise is a good clue to start with...

Point is that *I* don't know and *you* don't know either.

If you're going to sit around wallowing in The Socratic Truth, then why in the heck are you bothering to post at all? FWIW, my post wasn't about knowing or not knowing what's causing the OP's percieved battery life issues. I was addressing the plausiblity of Spotlight causing a battery life reduction being a real problem or not. An idea which you seemed to be dismissing, as you put it, by the "I don't know and you don't know" rationale.

thank you, Dr. Genius!

[Anonymous Coward]

We never would have thought of that!

I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10.4

[porkchop_d_clown]

I've got half a gig, but I'm swapping constantly and apps like Safari regularly swell to consume all available RAM.

Widgets that access the internet regularly consume a hundred megs of swap and mdimport will start eating processor at random moments. Mail.app regularly tries to index the hundreds of thousands of files on my company's Exchange server and comes to a screeching halt.

Frankly, Tiger's been a major disappointment.

Easy

[neurotypical]

Drag the volume you don't want indexed into the Privacy pane in Spotlight preferences.

Re:Easy

[earthbound kid]

That doesn't work for me for some folders. I'm not sure, but I think the connection is system owned folders versus user owned. At any rate, my attempts to exclude the /tmp/ folder from Spotlight are routinely foiled. But isn't that folder supposed to be excluded automatically anyway? Why do I get iTunes temp files in my results? I've tried flushing my index, and I'm on a clean install-- what's the deal?

Re:I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10.

[ciroknight]

Well, half a gig is what I'd call the bare minimum for an operating system like OS X anyways. People might cry foul, but Windows XP isn't really usable at under that notch either, as I can currently tell you, running Windows XP on a box with 192 megs of ram and crying every time I try to close winamp.

Widgets really aren't that big a harm, unless you install and use a hundred of them. Frankly, on my iBook, I use 3 widgets, and could live without 2 of them (the TV guide I won't give up).

Mail.app has never been that great, in my opinion, but I have a general problem with all mail utilities, so I'm not going to attest to anything here.

Tiger's still a kitten, in my opinion. A few service patches later I feel it'll start to come into its own, but right now, it's not the best. Keep in mind that Apple has this record of things not being exactly the best on release. It's a work in progress, and it's still better than it's competitors in my book.

Disable Dashboard and Spotlight here

[Anonymous Coward]

DisableTigerFeatures 1.0.3 - FREE

http://software.filkifan.com/

Mighty Mouse dissected detailed pictures and 76 widgets at once

http://homepage.mac.com/hogfish/PhotoAlbum2.html

Watching my DotMac bandwidth get Slashmelted - PRICELESS

Re:Disable Dashboard and Spotlight here

[macshome]

Ah ha! And the Mighty Mouse clearly has a piezo speaker in it!

Re:Disable Dashboard and Spotlight here

[TubeSteak]

you're a good man charlie brown

i've been waiting for someone to take apart their mighty mouse and post pictures.

P.S. I hate you for having the 30" monitor

Re:Disable Dashboard and Spotlight here

[calvincopter]

Please remove the http://software.filkifan.com/ [filkifan.com] link. It's a bad site and it contains viruses inside of it. Thank you.

Have you confirmed it?

[jhealy1024]

I'm not saying that it *isn't* Spotlight, but just about anything could be chewing up your battery. Widgets, indexing, screen savers, or even poor Engergy Saver settings. Have you checked to make sure that Spotlight is what's killing your battery?

Several people have been complaining about a bug in Tiger and the 2005 Powerbooks that has to do with the trackpad:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050 808165343661

It seems that the new tracking features eat up a lot of processor time (and thus, a lot of battery as well).

Again, I'm not dissing the Spotlight issue: it's definitely something to look at. But if you're still having trouble, you might check on other factors that can kill your battery life.

Pfft.

[porkchop_d_clown]

Frankly, 512 megs was more than usable with Panther; my wife's ibook with 256 was fine, if a little sluggish. Tiger has effectively forced me to cut back on how much I do with my Powerbook.

I wouldn't mind the memory requirements if they were worthwhile but - as I said and you seem to confirm - 150 megs of virtual memory so you can view your netflix queue seems a bit extreme.

Re:Pfft.

[ciroknight]

Nah, my iBook with 256 was barely usable in my own opinion, but it also had far fewer features under Panther that I really like about Tiger.

I didn't really confirm the widget memory usage either.. my machine really doesn't use too terribly much to deal with Dashboard, but I guess YMMV. Secondly, as I have 1,256MB of ram, and as it wasn't very expensive in view of the cost of the entire platform, I don't really notice too much anymore when it comes to memory. My machine performs very well for most every day operations and the only time I ever get angry with it is getting up overnight to use it and finding my battery dead and waiting for it to reboot (granted it doesn't take long, but I hate rebooting laptops).

Hey, if you're so disappointed, I wouldn't mind taking it off your hands.. ;)

Re:I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

My problem:

Each widget consumes 20MB of RAM, then consume a lot more of virtual memory. Some third party widgets don't know how to put themselves to sleep when Dashboard is off, so they continue to take CPU power.

Even on a system with 1.5GB RAM, I just decided to not use Dashboard, there are too many memory hogs and Dashboard really isn't useful enough. I think using Quicksilver to call up certain web sites and apps is quicker anyway.

Lithium batteries

[voixderaison]

I've noticed that lithium batteries sometimes degrade so rapidly (after 18 months or more of reliable service) that people sometimes associate the battery performance problem with some event -- a software upgrade or application install -- which was coincident with the battery demise. Sometimes they are so certain of the causality of the association that they won't buy a new battery.

Once they finally do, they are thrilled to discover that it's like having a new laptop again, with nice long battery life. Well, long by today's standards. I'd like a battery that could last a year, but I'm concerned by my own temptation to disassemble things to see how they are made...

*must* ... *not* ... *open* ... *nuclear cannister* ...

Re:Lithium batteries

[GoRK]

The main problem here is that unlike NiCad and NiMH (or rather to a much greater extent) lithium ion rechargables start to lose their life the second they are manufactured. This is why you can always find a set of retailers selling them at a high price and another set selling them at a low price. If you buy a battery that has been sitting on the shelf a couple of years, it's going to have a dramatically lower capacity than a brand new one.

Re:Lithium batteries

[greed]

Once they finally do, they are thrilled to discover that it's like having a new laptop again, with nice long battery life.

The trigger, for me, was that my iBook G3 would no longer run off battery for an entire feature-length DVD movie.

That just won't do, the whole reason for having a laptop is to have a portable DVD player that can also do e-mail and Web.

But it seems Apple improved the batteries between then and now... the runtime on the new battery is better than it was on the original battery when it was new. The case on the new battery is better manufactured as well: no gaps in the joins.

It just looks a little weird, because the older iBooks were slightly grey compared to the new models. So there's this Bright! Shiny! battery on a dull iBook.

Re:Lithium batteries

[Squozen]

Only a Mac owner would spend time staring at the underside of their laptop. :)

Unfortunately

[porkchop_d_clown]

I write code for Macs and Linux for a living so I need Tiger to ensure compatibility.

They *did* do a lot of nice stuff at the system level - launchd is interesting if a pain (because it adds a new barrier to making Linux system enhancements work with Mac) but they threw so much new syntactic sugar on top of everything as to force a migration to Intel just to get faster chips. ;-P

Tiger's new Sync model also broke the Exchange/iCal sync program I was using (groupcal), and caused a mysterious new bug in an open source program I wrote (pdf2psp) - I had to write my own ImageView subclass because NSImageView is apparently so "optimized" I couldn't get it dump it's old cache when loading a new image - code that worked fine in 10.3.x.

Here's a script to print out battery info...

[porkchop_d_clown]

#!/bin/bash

[ -x /usr/sbin/ioreg ] && \ /usr/sbin/ioreg -p IODeviceTree -n "battery" -w 0 | \
        sed -ne '/| *{/,/| *}/ {
                s/^[ |]*//g /^[{}]/!p
        }' | \
        awk '/IOBatteryInfo/ {
                A=$3 $4
                gsub("[{}()\"]","", A)
                gsub(","," ",A)
                print($1, $2, A)
        }'
# EOF

Save that as a shell script, when you run it from terminal it will produce info like this:

"IOBatteryInfo" = Capacity=4046 Amperage=1157 CycleCount=483 Current=2837 Voltage=12187 Flags=838860807 AbsoluteMaxCapacity=4400

The difference between AbsoluteMaxCapacity and Capacity gives you an idea of how much my battery has faded since it was new...

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[mccalli]

Getting an error:

./battery.sh: line 3:  /usr/sbin/ioreg: No such file or directory
sed: 2: "/| *{/,/| *}/ {   # Comment added to fool lameness filter
      ...": bad flag in substitute command: '/'

However, which ioreg produces /usr/sbin/ioreg. Any ideas?

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[hattig]

sed: 2: "/| *{/,/| *}/ {
        ...": bad flag in substitute command: '/'

Maybe I should have bought that sed and awk book ...

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $info = `/usr/sbin/ioreg -p IODeviceTree -n "battery" -w 0`;
my $batteryinfo = $info;
$batteryinfo =~ s/\n//g;
$batteryinfo =~ s/^.*\"(IOBatteryInfo)\" = \(\{(.*)\}\).*$/$1\n$2/g;
$batteryinfo =~ s/\"([\w ]*)\"=/\t$1: /g;
$batteryinfo =~ s/,/\n/g;
print $batteryinfo . "\n\n";

Does the trick too though, and is easily modifiable to log the fields too. It outputs in the format:

IOBatteryInfo
        Capacity: 4400
        Amperage: 18446744073709550638
        Cycle Count: 9
        Current: 3262
        Voltage: 11655
        Flags: 4
        AbsoluteMaxCapacity: 4400

God, do I have to type in loads of standard english text here to get it to submit? Bah! Well, here I am, stuck at home waiting for a delivery of a hard drive and drive enclosure. I'm sitting on my iBook wondering when it will turn up. I should be at work, but I can get away with not turning up as I can work from home. Foo foo foo foo. Is that a van I can hear? It appears not, no, wait, yes it is! Hurrah, a parcel! Fun fun fun fun. Gosh, I wonder if this is enough text.

No, it is not enough text. Sheesh, how frustrating. For a site for geeks, it is remarkably frustrating to post geeky stuff.

I'm just going to add logging to the script above, and then I can do what I said I'd do above.

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[hattig]

I can't fix the sed problem, but if you remove the \ after the && it gets rid of one problem.

I posted a perl program to do the same thing below though.

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[mccalli]

I posted a perl program to do the same thing below though.

Got it - works a treat thanks.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[OAB_X]

Wow. How incredably geeky of you.

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[pi_rules]

Or... you could open up the System Profiler and look at it.

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[Jord]

I wonder what would have happened if you had properly closed your tags so that only the code was monospaced...

/. might have liked it more...

Guess we will never know...

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[hattig]

I tried it smartass. I gave up and used the Code pull down option in the end.

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[hackstraw]

Nice script. However here is the output from my PowerBook:

IOBatteryInfo
                Capacity: 2947
                Amperage: 0
                Cycle Count: 226
                Current: 2942
                Voltage: 12414
                Flags: 1090519045
                AbsoluteMaxCapacity: 4200

My laptop is fully charged.

Does the Capacity of 2947 out of 4200 mean that my battery is going?

I don't get very good battery life anymore. My laptop is about 18 months old or so. Do you think its worthwhile to replace the battery?

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[hattig]

Thanks.

You've had 226 recharge cycles on the battery, and the capacity is under 3000mAh now, instead of the original 4200. You've lost around 1250mAh @ 12V over the 18 months.

Did you run that with the external power in though? I only get 12.4V when it is plugged in.

Whether you want another battery is up to you though. Is the battery life getting to be an issue?

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[hackstraw]

Heres the output when plugged in, followed by battery power:

Plugged in: IOBatteryInfo
                Capacity: 2947
                Amperage: 0
                Cycle Count: 226
                Current: 2942
                Voltage: 12413
                Flags: 1090519045
                AbsoluteMaxCapacity: 4200

Battery: IOBatteryInfo
                Capacity: 2947
                Amperage: 18446744073709550153
                Cycle Count: 226
                Current: 2942
                Voltage: 11753
                Flags: 4
                AbsoluteMaxCapacity: 4200

Whether you want another battery is up to you though. Is the battery life getting to be an issue?

I guess not, but I might use my laptop on battery more often if it got decent battery life.

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[porkchop_d_clown]

/. mangled the end-of-lines causing issues. Here's the correct version:

#!/bin/bash
 
[ -x /usr/sbin/ioreg ] && \
/usr/sbin/ioreg -p IODeviceTree -n "battery" -w 0 | \
        sed -ne '/| *{/,/| *}/ {
                s/^[ |]*//g
/^[{}]/!p
        }' | \
        awk '/IOBatteryInfo/ {
                A=$3 $4
                gsub("[{}()\"]","", A)
                gsub(","," ",A)
                print($1, $2, A)
        }'
# EOF

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[John Newman]

Cool, man. Thanks.

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[MyDixieWrecked]

something's whacked out with my battery... as I stated in an earlier post...

waxenpith:~ spike$ ./thing.pl
IOBatteryInfo
        Capacity: 24611
        Amperage: 18446744073709550959
        Cycle Count: 70
        Current: 2023
        Voltage: 15507
        Flags: 4
        AbsoluteMaxCapacity: 4200

something is totally screwed up. why is my capacity like 6x the absoluteMaxCapacity? =/

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[someone300]

Hehe..

My laptop's the same age and it's at 800mAh, design capacity of 4400mAh. It lasts about 10 minutes :D

Even my camera battery has more charge ;)

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[qubex]

In actual fact, you're deceived. That isn't a battery you have there. It is a donut of constricted fusion plasma inside a tokamak.

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[hattig]

Weirdtastic! 15.5V? Only 2A? The capacity is probably a function of the current voltage (voltage drops off as the capacity drops) and because the voltage is so high (and possibly the voltage drop off is a curve when graphed) it is reporting a massive capacity.

Apart from that, I have no idea! Send Apple an email, heh.

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[MyDixieWrecked]

well, back during one of the jaguar updates that got pulled, I noticed that all of a sudden, my battery always thinks it's at 99%. no matter what. Even when I push the button on the bottom, all 4 LEDs illuminate. I contacted apple at the time and they referred me to this page on their site where it tells you to charge the battery, then let it drain like 3 or 4 times to restore it.

didn't do shit.

after that, my battery life went from ~4-5 hours (with normal use) down to about 2 hours within a couple weeks.

What really sucks is that the machine just turns off when it's dead. I don't get any warning that it's is going to go or anything. Just boom. black screen.

I popped a good battery in from another powerbook, and everything worked fine. My battery, when in the other powerbook, has the same issues. so it's definitely the battery.

apple says that it's not covered by warranty. and last time I got the machine back from apple (I've had many hardware issues with it since I got it. had the LCD replaced 5 times and the logic board replaced 3. turned out it was bad RAM), the battery was jammed in there. I can't get it out to put the replacement battery in. I gotta send it back to apple within the next couple months before applecare runs out and I'm fucked.

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[hattig]

I'd tell them to replace the laptop, and you'll accept nothing else, the number of issues you've had with it make it a dud, and the law should be on your side.

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[fiftyfly]

not quite as nice to read, but one hell of a lot easier to type/debug ;):

ioreg -p IODeviceTree -n "battery" | grep IOBatteryInfo | sed 's/[ |{}()]//g' | cut -d"=" -f2-

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference between AbsoluteMaxCapacity and Capacity gives you an idea of how much my battery has faded since it was new...

So, apparently mine has improved over time?

"Capacity"=4491
"Amperage"=0
"Cycle Count"=56
"Current"=4484
"Voltage"=12509
"Flags "=1090519045
"AbsoluteMaxCapacity"=4400

Re:Here's a script to print out battery info...

[silverkniveshotmail.]

"IOBatteryInfo
Capacity"=3858
Amperage"=0
Cycle Count"=536
Current"=3854
Voltage"=12528
Flags"=838860805
AbsoluteMaxCapacity"=4400

Are apple's batteries hit and miss? i've got way more cycles yet a much higher capacity.

Re:I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10.

[elbobo]

I've got 768MB RAM in my 1GHz Powerbook and I'm still suffering memory issues.

I've been forced to slim down to only one widget left running (although I have several more that I'd really like to keep open constantly), and to keep an eye on the number of apps I have resident at any particular time.

I had no such memory concerns under Panther. I would have thought 768MB would be ample, but it appears not. I'm looking to move to 1GB RAM, and hoping that Apple continue to clean up Tiger.

The 10.4.2 update considerably improved the situation, but it has a lot further to go before I'll be completely happy with Tiger.

Re:I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10.

[drauh]

Agreed, re 512MB being bare minimum. I stuffed my 667MHz TiBook with 768MB, and have never (well, hardly ever) had problems with swapping.

If you just got 10.4, ...

[daviddennis]

it's possible that it's still indexing your entire volume, which might take a long time if you have a PowerBook with a high capacity drive.

I know that performance on my dual 2ghz G5 with 5gb RAM took a huge hit for about the first 24 hours after I installed Tiger. I have a lot of disk space (almost 2TB) hung off my machine, thus the long indexing time.

Once that's over, the other replies are right - Spotlight doesn't take up much in the way of resources. But during the initial index, the hit's pretty big and it would not surprise me if it hurt battery life too.

D

Re:If you just got 10.4, ...

[Winterblink]

I've heard varying accounts of just how long the indexing process ACTUALLY takes. Some have stated that even though the Spotlight icon in the menubar indicates it's ready for use, indexing is actually still continuing, and can do so for quite some time.

The problem is, with casual use of the computer while this is happening, indexing periods can drag for hours in the background. Some people have recommended a complete reindexing should be done at night while you're not using your computer, to ensure the process completes itself properly.

I can't say 100% if this is the case of course, but it wouldn't hurt to try it on a laptop and see if the performance isn't quite so bad, especially after a brand new installaton.

Re:If you just got 10.4, ...

[daviddennis]

I think the clue behind these varying times is that what you really need to do is plug in your laptop and turn off sleep. Then it will run overnight, but it's way too easy to never think to turn off sleep. Under those circumstances with light use of the computer it could take literally weeks to do the indexing!

D

Swapping and slow disk.

[BigZaphod]

It seems like ever since I switched to Tiger my PB has been much more prone to long swapping sessions like I've seen Windows boxes do. Plus, moving large files around seems far slower. I have 1GB Ram and 1.67Ghz processor and the system feels quite slow compared to Panther at times. It is very frustrating to say the least. I upgraded from a 1Ghz TiBook which ran Panther and it feels like I downgraded a lot of the time. Anyone know if there's a solution to this? And why the hell does flash take 100% CPU even for small banner ads? That drives me crazy.

Re:Swapping and slow disk.

[Trillan]

Did you by chance turn on "Use secure virtual memory" in Security?

Re:Swapping and slow disk.

[BigZaphod]

Nope. And I don't use an encrypted disk image or anything like that, either.

Re:Swapping and slow disk.

[airdrummer]

my 512mb/1.25mhz/15" aL pbook has been swapping like mad; sometimes an app would just hang for minutes at a time:-(

i did notice that i had frequent mds activity, and i remember a warning about a problem w/incomplete indexing if the machine was rebooted b4 indexing was finished, so i turned spotlight off, and it does seem to be much better...

next i'm gonna try re-enabling spotlight & let it finish...

Battery-eating Tiger

[dal20402]

Widgets use a ton of memory, even when Dashboard is inactive. (I've never seen one that uses CPU time, but other posters have claimed that some do.) Activity Monitor claims my 5 widgets use ~20MB physical/~140MB virtual each. Why? /bangs head

But if you never launch Dashboard, the widgets don't load.

Tiger has slightly shortened battery life on my 1.5GHz 12" 'Book (from 3:30 or so to 3:10 or so in my usual use). I haven't gone digging to find out why, but I'm suspicious of changes at a deeper level than Spotlight - mdimport is relatively quiet, but kernel_task is consistently about 8% CPU usage. People have blamed the trackpad driver, but these 'Books can run 10.3.7 and have scrolling trackpad functionality, and at least for me kernel_task was much less busy under Panther.

I still use Tiger, though. I like Mail 2 and I can't live without an AirPort Dashboard widget.

What about Dashboard?

[blamanj]

Don't some of the widgets run more or less all the time? I also recall seeing that some of the first versions had serious memory leaks, in which case you'd be swapping more frequently as well.

Re:What about Dashboard?

[sribe]

Don't some of the widgets run more or less all the time? I also recall seeing that some of the first versions had serious memory leaks, in which case you'd be swapping more frequently as well.

I can confirm that one of the first versions would get into a state where it would eat up all available CPU. Unfortunately, they all show up with the same name under top, and I wasn't thinking and didn't try to view complete command lines... This seems to have stopped since 10.4.2.

Re:What about Dashboard?

[TheRaven64]

More importantly, each widget uses around 20MB of REAL memory. If this pushes you over the threshold where you need to do a lot of swapping then your disk will spend a lot of time spun-up and this will kill battery life.

Doctor, it hurts when I poke myself in the eye.

[Anonymous Coward]

Poster wrote (emphasis mine):

"... However, when using my PowerBook unplugged, it seems that my battery lasts a noticeably less time. ... Does someone have a better explanation for why my battery seems to drain out, prematurely? ..."

So you're basically saying that your battery lasts longer when you don't unplug your laptop? 8^] No $h*t, sherlock. That's because you're not using battery when it's plugged in. :P

Seriously though, kids. Take a lesson from the guy who complains to the doctor that it hurts when he pokes himself in the eye. Stop doing that! If you normally run your computer plugged in (using wall current), don't expect it to run "as long" unplugged (limited by battery).

This message brought to you by the letters I and D, the number 10 and the letter T.

not Spotlight's fault, it's a problem with OS X

[wilton]

Read this:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050 808165343661

It is actually a bug with the driver for the new USB scrolling trackpad. This has been noted in various forums and Apple are aware of this problem.

If you plug in an external mouse and disable the trackpad, or replace the driver with SideTrack, the problem goes away.

This only effects the 2005 Powerbooks, and causes much higher CPU and memory load.

Will

Re:not Spotlight's fault, it's a problem with OS X

[hattig]

The new iBooks also use the scrolling trackpad, so I imagine that it will be a problem for them as well?

My new iBook says it has 4 hours and 40 minutes of battery currently (just removed the power cord from a full charge). This is less than the 6 hours I expected of it, although 4.7 hours is still pretty good. I wonder if it would increase if I installed SideTrack?

My powerbook background task woes..

[Anonymous Coward]

I run Activity Monitor all the time, it has an iconized form that can be displayed on the dock with a little graph. I find it invaluable for catching rogue processes that decide to run off and use 100% of the CPU. Which is simply offensive when I'm on battery and annoying when plugged in as my PB gets so damned hot when the CPU is working.

But my biggest hate are the background "nervous ticks" that the hard drive does occasionally. In a quiet room it is loud. Just sitting at the desktop or at this page (with only Firefox open), the drive chatters every 20 seconds or so - it's a quick little kind of noise as though it's resetting the drive or occasionally seeking through a file. The computer will often wake up the (sleeping) drive to do this mindless nothing, which is most noticable if I'm typing in a remote terminal window for a long time (and am doing absolutely NO local disk access yet it insists on waking the drive up every now and then to do.. something).

It makes me wish there was a "shut the fuck up" switch I could press to stop the computer from doing anything unrelated to my current process and just turn the damn drive off.

I never thought I'd long for the single-process days of DOS. The machine might have been slower but at least the OS never did annoying crap behind your back.

hmmm

[Anubis350]

it's funny, I've actually noticed longer battery life under tiger. I attribute it to turning off dashbaord though, as it seems to have started around then. I wrote myself a small applescript to turn it off/on after I noticed my battery life seemed to go down on tiger from panther. Afterwards it shot back up, perhaps it's not spotlight, but dashboard....

Re:I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10.

[Anubis350]

my sister just got an ibook, when I first started it up to help her set it up it had the stock half gig and it was swapping like crazy. I added a second half gig (corsair) sim I grabbed from new egg and, eureka! performance went through the roof.

My powerbook has had one gig from the beginning, and I havent had any probs. Tiger's pretty memory hungry, perhaps you should grad another half gig. The sim I got from new egg was around 50 bucks, so good deal. Check it out.

Yes, some widgets do eat CPU all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly the games and other animations that just keep running all the time.

Probably the worst is taking of RAM at all times, so unless you have a PowerMac with lots of RAM, it's probably a good idea to keep the amount of widgets down.

Could be Dashboard - Try This Command

[Jackdaw Rookery]

Open Terminal and type this command, followed by return:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Restart the dock, dashboard is dead.

To get dashboard back type:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

Re:Could be Dashboard - Try This Command

[Anonymous Freak]

Or just remove the Dashboard icon from the Dock, and turn off all keyboard or mouse commands that activate it, then reboot. Dashboard won't launch after a reboot until activated, so if you make it so you can't activate it, it won't launch.

To get Dashboard back? Just go to the Exposé & Dashboard pref pane and give yourself a way to turn it back on!

It's not spotlight

[kataflok]

Spotlight put the machine through hell for a few days while it indexed everything it could find -- then it went to sleep.

Dashboard was eating battery life by 20% and increasing wait times on certain apps significantly -- that is until I killed it. Battery life instantly jumped right back up.

Spotlight is a one off issue that lasts about a day -- Dashboard is the ongoing PITA.

Did you consider...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that you might have one of those defective batteries they warned consumers about? Next time you go to use spotlight, your battery might just explode rather than drain. Or not.

Processor speed stepping too aggressive?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that my powerbook has been running noticably hotter since about the time I installed tiger. This also happens to be around the beginning of summer, so maybe the two are unrelated. But I think it has something to do with the processor speed stepping: it looks like this is more aggressive in tiger. I normally run with the processor speed in "automatic". When I compare performance and CPU temperature with the "reduced" and "high" settings for various tasks, it looks like it's jumping to the high setting too soon (higher temperatures for tasks that don't use 100% CPU) and also to the low setting too soon (lower performance for tasks that use 100% CPU).

So you may want to consider setting the processor performance to "reduced" when you're on the battery. Also make sure you kill all unnecessary programs that eat CPU time. Some widgets do this, but itunes also always uses a few % CPU when it's not playing and word even more than 10% a lot of the time.

And li-ion batteries go bad pretty fast, consider buying a new one. I was shocked to see that my new powerbook battery had 50% more capacity than my 1.5 year old one.

Re:I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10.

[peragrin]

I also have 768mb in my 1.3 ghz powerboook. I don't have any of the problems you people are describing.

I ahve a half a dozen widgets, itunes, safari(or firefox) is always runningI use fire for IM'ing and that is always up as well as iterm. I then start a game up and still nothing stutters. Heck I can run Photoshop with it and nothing happens.

The one bug I have found is that Safari has a probelm letting go of threads once they are formed. So after a week of runing non stop it has 40-50 threads on it's own and performs slowly. Nothing a close and restart the app doesn't fix.

Now I have only one internet dahboard widget, the rest are passive. and none take more than 15 megs of RAM. Of course those go into swap since they aren't being constatly updated.

Battery & iBook

[Anonymous Coward]

I've noticed 2 things with Tiger on my iBook (700 MHz G3). Yes, the battery life is much less, though my battery somehow took a "hit" during one of the 10.3.x upgrade cycles. Or maybe it was a firmware update, I forget, anyway, the battery wouldn't charge fully. Being old, I replaced it (to find out my iBook was of the "opaque" varriety and not "white"), but this battery too only gives me ~ 3.5 hrs.
And about Spotlight, since I only have a 20G HD, and the iBook is my "secondary" machine, I don't keep alot on it. But whatever Spotlight does in storing it's metadata, really chews up the HD space. Loading Tiger and iLife '05 and iWork'05, I saw my HD go from having ~ 10G of free space down to 4G of free space, with no other additions. I know the added programs didn't chew up 6Gig of space! I shutter to think what's going to happen when I load Tiger on my primary (tower, QS 2001) with 1x60 and 1x80 G drives!

Re:Battery & iBook

[shylock0]

Actually, those added programs do chew up a significant amount of disk space -- particularly iLife '05.

The iMovie demo and tutorial files and the Garageband clips easily take up 3-5 gigs of space.

Re:I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10.

[hattig]

I have 512MB in my iBook, and I never noticed issues when running Dashboard, Mail, Safari, Terminal, etc, at the same time. Hell even running Eclipse it wasn't too bad, except waking up from sleep.

What I have done though is turn off Dashboard, and I'm going to write an application to log the battery power using ioreg (from a post above) from a full charge, then compare it to running with Dashboard from a full charge.

Re:I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10.

[elbobo]

I initially went for 768MB RAM because I run a lot of concurrent applications. Right now (normal use) I have these applications resident:

Safari, NewsFire, Sciral Consistency, iCal, Mail, Adium, Colloquy, iTunes, Activity Monitor, XCode.

I also used to run a local apache+postgresql dev environment, under Panther. 768MB RAM was still ample for this workload. But yes, Tiger has higher memory requirements and my usage is perhaps heavier than that of an average user :(

Turning off spotlight?

[SgtChaireBourne]

I searched around some months ago about how to disable spotlight, but couldn't find anything. I've taken my best guess at it via the command line, but still would like to find an authoritative answer to my question:

How can I completely disable Spotlight?

It's not a feature I want. If I did, then I'd want a completely different level of granularity: several separate indexes of e-mail, and separate indexes for source code, misc projects, and articles. Each of those gets indexed separately.

Re:Turning off spotlight?

[TheRaven64]

Turning off Spotlight is easy. Edit /etc/hostconfig (the equivalent of a BSD /etc/rc.conf) and find the line that says

SPOTLIGHT=-YES-

Changing this to

SPOTLIGHT=-NO-

will disable spotlight. Unfortunately, this will disable it everywhere - no more searching in Address Book, Mail.app, or any other app whose search relies on Spotlight.

Re:Turning off spotlight?

[SgtChaireBourne]

Many thanks. I don't use either of those, but will keep an eye open for things that might break. The general idea of Spotlight is fine, but I want separate indexes for many things and I want it to only index the hierarchies I explicitly tell it to.

Re:I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10.

[hattig]

Yeah, I'm also running Adium, Apache, Tomcat and Postgresql. In intensive times (running Eclipse J2EE view and Running a web app on the tomcat server it can chug a bit. But it still runs fine mostly, and I've got a 1GB SODIMM in the post somewhere which should get rid of the final issues.

To turn Spotlight off...

[MrPerfekt]

Add this to /etc/hostconfig:

SPOTLIGHT=-NO-

Reboot, and you're done. The indexing service won't even load at boot. The spotlight icon will still be in the corner but will do absolutely nothing when you type in a string.

And by the way, a watched pot also never boils. I think you're just imagining that it's sucking up all your battery. But hey, it may use a few extra cycles and use up your battery a little quicker.

Spotlight shouldn't affect battery life

[ryfar]

When Spotlight indexes a volume for the first time, it has to index every file for that volume, and that can certainly take up a lot of energy. However, once the volume has been indexed, Spotlight doesn't have to do any more explicit indexing of files. Instead, files are run through the appropriate metadata importer every time it is written, and the metadata that is imported from the given file is added to Spotlight's internal database. This should really be a method that uses almost no battery life beyond what gets used for the file writing activity, since there is virtually no overhead and no background indexing, as with other search solutions.

Of course, one way to try to get some idea of any extra battery drain caused by Spotlight would be to determine how long the battery lasts with Spotlight turned on vs. turned off (using the mdutil command). However, you should be aware that if you run without Spotlight turned on for a while, it will need to explicitly index every file that was altered while Spotlight indexing was turned off, so you don't want to use that extra indexing time as part of your test run with indexing turned on. Any way you slice it, trying to get performance figures for indexing vs. non-indexing would be a pretty inaccurate process, and the only results that could be taken seriously would be if there were a gross difference between the two; any minor battery life differences would really have to be attributed to difference in user activity.

energy

[technotot]

the disk spins during indexing.

Re:I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10.

[raider_red]

I had the same issues running Panther on my Powerbook, which also had 512 MB of RAM. I upgraded to 1.25 GB, and it's been running much better.

Re:I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10.

[Jord]

X-Charge probably does exactly what you are planning on writing.

Unless you really want to write it... then nevermind.

Dude, ACPI is your friend

[phorm]

laptop:/# cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/info
present: yes
design capacity: 6600 mAh
last full capacity: 5312 mAh
battery technology: rechargeable
design voltage: 14800 mV
design capacity warning: 300 mAh
design capacity low: 200 mAh
capacity granularity 1: 32 mAh
capacity granularity 2: 32 mAh
model number: 01NT
serial number: 16412
battery type: LION
OEM info: LGC-LGC

Re:Dude, ACPI is your friend

[hattig]

ACPI is part of IOKit on Mac OS X, so you have to use ioreg to access the data as far as I am aware.

Re:Dude, ACPI is your friend

[phorm]

Ah, thanks for the correction. I'd assumed OSX had a standard proc-style interface to ACPI, but it's always nice to be corrected in a non-flaming manner :-)

Re:Dude, ACPI is your friend

[HighBit]

standard proc? hehee

Re:Dude, ACPI is your friend

[geniusj]

That's what I was thinking. Since when is a) procfs 'standard' and b) linux's procfs anywhere close to standard?

CPU Load A Possible Factor, Watching Energy Use

[camperslo]

I haven't yet used a meter to see how much the power comsumption is going up, but through use of the menubar utility Menu Meters, I've caught CPU use being unexpectedly high at times. Even without meausuring the power I'm certain that it increases, as my old TiBook fires up the fan after these periods of high CPU activity.

The primary source of unexpected CPU load for me turned out to be certain animated banner/skyscraper animated ads. I haven't looked at page source to figure out just what they were, but I suspect Flash. Reloading pages and getting the ads to change has brought the CPU use back to very low levels while sitting on a page. I've even seen these high-cpu ads on Slashdot at times.

Although I haven't seen a problem with any Apple-supplied Dashboard Widgets, some third-party widgets use more CPU than I'd expect when they're in the background.

The Options section of the Energy Saver control panel allows setting reduced processor performance. That helps too. Separate settings are available for battery and adaptor operation. I find myself using the "reduced" setting even for adaptor operation at times just because I don't like the computer to get so hot. It's fine on a glass desktop or coffee table, but really cooks on a bedspread!

Activity Monitor should help spot processes that are using the CPU heavily. It and Menu Meters can show disk activity also, but I haven't found a way to tell which processes are using the disk. I haven't noticed much activity I'd attribute to Spotlight, except when first connecting a Firewire drive.

It is very easy to see what's going on with power consumption if you measure the power going into the AC adaptor (best done when you've reached the fully charged state, but you can still see changes while charging).

I use a small meter I picked up at Radio Shack called the "Kill A Watt". It makes it very easy to see how much effect things like screen brightness settings have (a bunch).

I think many on Slashdot would find one of those meters useful. They're very handy for spotting things around the house that use power even when off. Using one was enough to get me to swap most of my generic AC adaptors with transformers for the variety with switching supplies (most easily identified by their lower weight).
Tests revealed that even my soldering stations had the transformer cores energized when "off". I rewired them to put the power switch before the transformer instead of after. Metering also easily showed the effects of over (and under) clocking PCs here. Watching power consumption everywhere not only helps laptop battery life, but the environment and the the budget. A fast and dirty rule of thumb I use for estimating cost is $1 a month for every 10 Watts that's consumed 24 hours a day. (Those AC adaptors, cable/satellite boxes, routers, VCRs, microwave ovens, doorbells, thermostats, amplified speakers, remote-control devices etc are probably all using some power all the time!)

Re:CPU Load A Possible Factor, Watching Energy Use

[cosmic_0x526179]

Activity Monitor should help spot processes that are using the CPU heavily.

you betcha ! Crank up some old moldy (and poorly behaved) system 7/8 app under classic. See if you can get it to crash (which shouldn't be all that difficult). Then kick back and watch 'truBlueEnvironment' red-line the CPU usage on Activity Monitor. weeeeeeeee!

Re:I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10.

[hattig]

What I've got at the moment is a program that outputs to CSV so you can plot all the variables over time in Excel, OpenOffice, etc.

Still, nice to know that someone else wanted the same sort of thing too. I'm not up to date on Cocoa programming though, maybe it'll make an interesting first application.

Powerbook battery life sucks badly, period

[xtal]

My TiBook had great battery life. 4 hours of use. Nice.

My 1ghz 15" Albook is lucky to manage 2.5hrs, and that's with a new battery. Perhaps the 12" model with a smaller screen might be a little better.

I've considered going back to a older TiBook running linux, not OSX, for long trips on the road with frequent battery use. I wish Apple would address this; I suspect it is a problem borne out of the choice and clock rate of chip. I'll be very happy when a intel mobile is available - if I don't get a T21 thinkpad or something first.

17" 1GHz Aluminum PowerBook

[easter1916]

I get about 3.5 hours battery life on this machine with a two-year old battery. Web, email, some development, playing iTunes over Airport Express...

Re:17" 1GHz Aluminum PowerBook

[bob frost]

Yeah, think about the Airport Express... I've read that there's en/decyrption at each end, and I've noticed that that 's pretty CPU-intensive.

battery usage

[chivo243]

try lowering the brightness level of the screen, and having your screen go to sleep quickly... power management

twos compliment, you dog, you

[rndmcnlly]

Thats quite a bit of Amperage, my friend. My results: # normal operation, not plugged in (same as 2^62-2055) Amperage: 18446744073709549561 # just plugged in (says Calculating) Amperage: 0 # juicing up from the wall Amperage: 2647 # just unplugged (Calculating again) Amperate: 0 # full brightness backlight Current: 1496 # no backlight, hmm Current: 1484 # guess my battery is pretty healty Capacity: 4468 AbsoluteMaxCapacity: 4400

Re:twos compliment, you dog, you

[hattig]

I hadn't thought about that, I had noticed the number was quite large though. Nice for you to get a 1.5% battery boost :)

Profiler doesn't give you the max capacity.

[porkchop_d_clown]

It gives you the current capacity but not the max.

Yes, your battery is going

[porkchop_d_clown]

is it worth replacing? That depends on your need. When the battery in my old ibook got to the point it wouldn't last 1/2 hour, it was also high time to upgrade, so I just gave it to my son and bought my PB. :D

Yup.

[porkchop_d_clown]

I wish Apple would address this; I suspect it is a problem borne out of the choice and clock rate of chip.

They did - it's the main reason they're moving to Intel chips; they couldn't get PPC chips with the power characteristics they needed.

I barely get 2.

[porkchop_d_clown]

Interesting. Of course, I tend to use my machine quite hard - it's awake 12 hours per day, minimum.

Ow my battery

[imsoclever]

Yeah powering a spotlight with my PowerBook really drains the battery.

Fixed version of script

[porkchop_d_clown]

/. broke the script here's a correctly formatted version:

#!/bin/bash
 
[ -x /usr/sbin/ioreg ] && \
/usr/sbin/ioreg -p IODeviceTree -n "battery" -w 0 | \
        sed -ne '/| *{/,/| *}/ {
                s/^[ |]*//g
/^[{}]/!p
        }' | \
        awk '/IOBatteryInfo/ {
                A=$3 $4
                gsub("[{}()\"]","", A)
                gsub(","," ",A)
                print($1, $2, A)
        }'
# EOF

You, me, and everyone I've talked to.

[ThreeDayMonk]

You're not alone. My 768 MB iBook G4 has suffered a performance downgrade with Tiger, frequently swapping like mad, although matters have improved quite a lot since I disabled Dashboard entirely.

Safari also eats memory, and benefits from a regular termination and restart.

Tiger's Mail is deeply flawed, especially when dealing with IMAP accounts. It often freezes when receiving new IMAP messages. It deletes IMAP emails without moving them to the Trash properly (settings to the contrary regardless), so I have to be careful not to hit the Delete key accidentally. It can't "Save as Draft" when composing in ISO-2022-JP (the email encoding used in Japan). Most of all, though, it has apparently been coded with a complete lack of concern for data integrity.

Screen brightness

[ThreeDayMonk]

I second that comment on screen brightness. Using my iBook on the lowest brightness setting increases the battery life by over an hour.

How about a script to it for you?

[Anubis350]

how about an applescript to do it for you? Save as app and still the icon from the dock launch app. Stick it in your dock and you're set...

display dialog "Dashboard on or off?" buttons {"On", "Off"} default button "On"
copy the button returned of the result to theSel
if theSel is equal to "Off" then
        do shell script "defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES"
end if
if theSel is equal to "On" then
        do shell script "defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO"
end if
do shell script "killall Dock"

False

[Moraelin]

"Well, half a gig is what I'd call the bare minimum for an operating system like OS X anyways. People might cry foul, but Windows XP isn't really usable at under that notch either"

False. Windows XP runs great in 512 MB RAM.

"as I can currently tell you, running Windows XP on a box with 192 megs of ram and crying every time I try to close winamp."

How about comparing apples to apples? You're comparing an 192 MB RAM machine with XP, to a 512 MB RAM machine with Tiger. We're talking more that 2.5 times difference in memory size. _If_ that's the kind of difference needed to make Windows XP swap like Tiger, then you're just telling me that Tiger is a horrible memory hog.

Re:False

[jellomizer]

"Well, half a gig is what I'd call the bare minimum for an operating system like OS X anyways. People might cry foul, but Windows XP isn't really usable at under that notch either"

False. Windows XP runs great in 512 MB RAM.

You do know that 512 MB is a half a gig. I have seen tiger on a computer with 256 megs of ram and while it is not speed deamon it seems to run a lot more smoother then XP with the same amount of ram.

graphics chip a factor

[rogerbo]

It's not JUST spotlight.

Tiger uses 3D acceleration for lots more basic gui stuff than Panther did. The laptop graphics chips run hot and drain power. Them being constantly in use for basic stuff is what makes Tiger drain the battery faster. As the chip is running all the time the fan is in use more often which drains the battery even faster. This was really noticeable on my Tibook when I installed Tiger.

Apple needs to add an option in Energy Saver to drop back to software for everything when running on battery power.

Turn off indexing of the Desktop

[Been on TV]

If you download a lot of stuff and land it on the desktop, or you work on documents on the desktop, I have found that adding the desktop to the Privacy list helps overall system performance.
Nothing is more annoying than Spotlight starting to index that .gz file that gets thrown away just a few seconds later after unpacking it, only to have Spotlight remove the content from its index again.

I also believe turning on Safari's Private Browsing function will save you for a lot of disc accesses, and using something like Safari Enhancer to turn off the Safari disc cache will help too (if you are on a reasonably fast connection.)

LoL - so it's a race, is it?

[porkchop_d_clown]

:-D

Nice script.

viruses?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this program contains bad code and you can prove it, by all means do so.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 26899

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/18182

Since you haven't posted here very much it's hard to just take your word for it.

Switch from Dashboard to Konfabulator.

[argent]

Konfabulator widgets seem to be WAY less CPU-intensive than Dashboard.

I've noticed that other programs that have gone to webkit from doing straight Aqua/Quartz layout have become slower and more CPU-hungry. It makes sense, Webkit is doing a lot more work, and it's got to re-render a lot more material when a script change changes the content.

Re:I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found that Dashboard widgets periodically start consuming large amounts of processor and memory, for no apparent reason. And this is on a dual-G4 with 2 GB of RAM. So I stopped using them.

I don't think this is limited to just the ones that use the internet.

Other than that, I have no complaints about Tiger.

Exclude the Entourage database file from Spotlight

[mgh02114]

Spotlight sees the Entourage database as one large file. Everytime you download a single piece of email spam, the entire database file changes and Spotlight tries to reindex the whole thing, over and over again. If you have Entourage open and set to check your mail every 20 minutes, you force Spotlight to reindex a ~1GB file containing every email message on your computer every 20 min.

Spotlight can't see into Entourage anyway, so you aren't loosing any functionality by telling Spotlight to ignore that file.