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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?"
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.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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
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.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
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
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!)