Arch Linux

MythicLlama

Member

Registered: 2009-04-07

Posts: 21

Openbox Battery Life

Quick question about DE's different configurations to extend battery life.

My problem is I've been running an Openbox setup for a while (no other gnome or kde dependencies, the only xfce app is the power manager) and I've been getting about 2 and half hours out of my setup with cpufreq and laptop-mode setup properly.  I reformatted the other day because I finally had the time to switch to a 64-bit setup so I decided to see how Gnome was doing and installed it fully to play around with it before I made my laptop's plans set in stone.

Behold, (after switching out the broken gnome-power-manager for xfce's) I'm getting about 3 and a half hours out of it!  I hadn't even setup laptop-mode and I saw that my processor was underclocked with the ondemand profile.  Is there something special about how Gnome is installed that is giving me better battery life or did I screw up somewhere in my Openbox setup?

All of these statistics were from the estimated time, but I let my laptop discharge to about ~50% or so with usual activity and the estimated times were rather correct.

demian

Member

From: Frankfurt, Germany

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 709

Re: Openbox Battery Life

It all comes down to the correct settings and the resource consumption of the DE/wm itself.
Therefore, you should be able to reach an even lower consumption with Openbox since it uses less resources.

For a better comparison you should use powertop, which measures the consumption in Watts. I suggest you just install openbox, activate laptop-mode and apply some of the important power tweaks found here and use powertop to compare it to your Gnome-DE.
It should not differ.

How much RAM do you have? If you have at least 4 GB and used to use PAE to address it fully, then 32-bit is less effective than 64-bit arch. This might make a slight difference in power consumption. However, 64-b should use slightly more RAM so the overall-difference shouldn't be big.

// Come to think of it, I will backup my Openbox-Install and try out Gnome. I'll let you know the results.

// As expected - no difference. Gnome consumes .2 W more. I guess it's mainly due to the higher amount of wakeups and slightly higher RAM usage. Tried out Ubuntu Jaunty too, since it ships with Gnome and I had the CD lying around. Power consumption was considerably higher. Couldn't get below 7 W with stock kernel 2.6.28-11. In Arch it's 5.8 W using a custom kernel.

Last edited by demian (2009-06-13 17:54:29)

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