EDIT: After reading @jandry's reply, I decided to give another distro with a different window manager a try to see if it is really Unity's fault. I installed UbuntuGnome, and to my utmost surprise the battery life on a fresh vanilla installation, was about 8-10 hours which is even better than Windoze 7! It's a shame that Unity is the culprit here.
I'm running Ubuntu 13.10 on a Thinkpad T530 machine. (Core i7, 9-cell battery, 16GB RAM, nVidia + Intel VGA, 15" LCD, ...). Since I don't play games, I have disabled the nVidia card from BIOS so practically the system has only one VGA card, the Intel one.
I have installed and enabled laptop-mode-tools
. When running on battery, the battery provides about 3 hours of charge. The same machine, running Windoze 7, had about 7-10 hours of battery life.
I understand that comparing battery consumption on Windoze and Linux doesn't make sense as it is deeply dependent on the quality of the drivers available on either operating system. However, still, 3 hours of charge is pretty much ridiculous for a 9-cell battery.
I installed powertop
to find a clue. Here's a full output after logging in and before running any applications:
The battery reports a discharge rate of 23.5 W
The estimated remaining time is 2 hours, 18 minutes
Summary: 341.5 wakeups/second, 6.5 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 6.9% CPU use
Power est. Usage Events/s Category Description
3.56 W 2729 rpm Device Laptop fan
3.15 W 1.1% Device Display backlight
1.58 W 0.0% Device Display backlight
383 mW 0.3 pkts/s Device Network interface: wlan0 (iwlwifi)
45.3 mW 11.6 ms/s 54.5 Process compiz
30.3 mW 14.9 ms/s 23.7 Process /usr/lib/unity/unity-panel-service
20.1 mW 9.7 ms/s 19.6 Process indicator-multiload
13.6 mW 6.8 ms/s 9.1 Process /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/hud/hud-service
8.11 mW 3.3 ms/s 21.9 Process /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/indicator-application-service
7.84 mW 3.7 ms/s 9.7 Process chromium-browser --no-startup-window
7.03 mW 419.1 µs/s 15.0 Process syndaemon -i 1.0 -t -K -R
6.18 mW 650.0 µs/s 59.0 Process [rcu_sched]
5.79 mW 2.9 ms/s 3.5 Process /usr/bin/X -core :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch
5.73 mW 1.3 ms/s 39.9 Interrupt [46] i915
4.69 mW 1.5 ms/s 21.5 Process [irq/45-iwlwifi]
4.17 mW 2.2 ms/s 0.00 Process dbus-daemon --fork --session --address=unix:abstract=/tmp/dbus-S5L9UiJPRW
3.32 mW 0.9 ms/s 2.6 Process gnome-terminal
2.43 mW 1.3 ms/s 0.15 Process powertop
2.05 mW 0.8 ms/s 6.9 Process upstart-dbus-bridge --daemon --session --user --bus-name session
2.01 mW 0.9 ms/s 3.5 kWork iwl_bg_run_time_calib_work
1.53 mW 372.9 µs/s 9.8 Timer hrtimer_wakeup
1.46 mW 679.7 µs/s 2.0 Process /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/indicator-cpufreq
1.42 mW 425.4 µs/s 7.3 Timer tick_sched_timer
973 µW 116.3 µs/s 9.0 kWork ieee80211_iface_work
864 µW 307.7 µs/s 3.3 Process stardict
844 µW 99.0 µs/s 7.8 Interrupt [45] iwlwifi
629 µW 263.2 µs/s 1.5 Process /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/indicator-power/indicator-power-service
478 µW 252.0 µs/s 0.00 Process [kworker/u16:5]
475 µW 245.6 µs/s 0.10 kWork output_poll_execute
447 µW 233.2 µs/s 0.05 Process [rcuos/6]
418 µW 220.3 µs/s 0.00 Process [kworker/u16:7]
398 µW 205.0 µs/s 0.10 Process [rcuos/0]
384 µW 202.2 µs/s 0.00 Process [rcuos/4]
381 µW 200.9 µs/s 0.00 Timer process_timeout
380 µW 195.9 µs/s 0.10 Interrupt [7] sched(softirq)
373 µW 35.7 µs/s 3.6 kWork intel_unpin_work_fn
329 µW 173.2 µs/s 0.00 Interrupt [1] timer(softirq)
303 µW 110.9 µs/s 1.1 Process /usr/lib/upower/upowerd
256 µW 135.0 µs/s 0.00 Process dbus-daemon --system --fork
251 µW 39.7 µs/s 2.1 kWork intel_fbc_work_fn
240 µW 102.3 µs/s 0.5 Process NetworkManager
230 µW 121.2 µs/s 0.00 Process [rcuos/2]
181 µW 95.3 µs/s 0.00 Timer delayed_work_timer_fn
153 µW 72.0 µs/s 0.20 Process /usr/sbin/irqbalance
149 µW 30.2 µs/s 1.1 Interrupt [4] block(softirq)
140 µW 56.0 µs/s 0.4 Process gnome-settings-daemon -r
134 µW 70.5 µs/s 0.00 Interrupt [9] RCU(softirq)
126 µW 64.2 µs/s 0.05 Process [rcuos/3]
Also, all CPU cores are running at ~1200MHz and I have manually disabled all the services I don't mind starting manually like postgresql
or tor
. As you can see the battery is discharging at ~24W/h which is outrageous.
How can I improve the situation here? What is the main culprit behind this awful discharge rate? I can't understand the logic that how powertop
is reporting that value. I have read a ton of post regarding power consumption but to no avail.
TIA,