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titaniumbones

Member

Registered: 2013-12-20

Posts: 52

power drains rapidly while sleeping during suspend-to-ram

I have a lenovo T440s laptop, running arch and gnome.  This is a really nice machine, and almost everything works really well.  It's Haswell-based and has pretty long battery life while awake.  If I put the laptop into sleep (usually by shutting the lid) power seems to drain very rapidly, almost as fast as when it's awake.  I'm wondering:

(1)  what tools should I use to get good data about how fast power really is draining?  I don't have any precise measurements and I wonder if maybe I'm just mistaken about this.
(2) has anyone esperiencd problems like this before, and do you have some tips about what sorts of things to try?  I'd like to compare pm-suspend & the native systemctl suspend mechanism, for instance [ but see (1)...]

Thanks in advance for your help!

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: power drains rapidly while sleeping during suspend-to-ram

No idea about the battery drain.  But you probably don't want to use pm-utils considering that the last commit I see on its CGIT is from 2010.

titaniumbones

Member

Registered: 2013-12-20

Posts: 52

Re: power drains rapidly while sleeping during suspend-to-ram

No idea about the battery drain.  But you probably don't want to use pm-utils considering that the last commit I see on its CGIT is from 2010.

huh.  I had just assumed that gnome was using pm-utils for suspend & hibernate events -- I'm coming from Ubuntu where I'm pretty sure that's the case.  That sort of takes away one hope I had for improving the situation. 

If anyone else out htere has ideas for monitoring power drain, I'd really appreciate it.

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: power drains rapidly while sleeping during suspend-to-ram

I don't think that pm-utils is a hard dependency of gnome anymore.  At least the xfce4-power-manager doesn't require it anymore... nor does KDE4 I don't think.  But I don't use a full DE or any kind of power manager, I just see that 'pactree -rs pm-utils' indicates that nothing depends on it in the repos.

orschiro

Member

Registered: 2009-06-04

Posts: 2,136

Website

Re: power drains rapidly while sleeping during suspend-to-ram

That's an interesting issue you are raising here. Have you actually noted down the percentage before sending your laptop into sleep and the percentage on resume after e.g. an hour later?

Secondly, do you need a quick resume on sleep? If not, then why not using hibernation instead?

---

@orschiro

Abzstrak

Member

Registered: 2014-03-26

Posts: 5

Re: power drains rapidly while sleeping during suspend-to-ram

I'm having the exact same issue with a System76 Galago Ultra Pro.... I really don't know what to do to troubleshoot it either, its kinda frustrating.  Have you gotten anywhere on the issue?  I'm losing about 5%-10% of the battery every hour it's asleep.  I wonder if its a haswell i7 issue of somesort, maybe its too new and there are bugs?

teateawhy

Member

From: GER

Registered: 2012-03-05

Posts: 1,138

Website

Re: power drains rapidly while sleeping during suspend-to-ram

There are two factors here:
* The RAM has to be refreshed in regular intervals to hold the data, which consumes power. Generally speaking, this effect increases with higher storage capacity.
* Some built-in devices are not shut down and still consume power although they are unused. It helps to turn off unused devices in the BIOS settings.

@titaniumbones
I see that you are using a T440s. Some thinkpads have a yellow USB port that can be used to charge other devices via USB, even if the laptop is suspended. In my thinkpad i turned off this setting in the BIOS as it is also draining power when no device is connected. I think it is called "always-on-usb".

Last edited by teateawhy (2014-03-29 17:28:08)

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: power drains rapidly while sleeping during suspend-to-ram

@titaniumbones
I see that you are using a T440s. Some thinkpads have a yellow USB port that can be used to charge other devices via USB, even if the laptop is suspended. In my thinkpad i turned off this setting in the BIOS as it is also draining power when no device is connected. I think it is called "always-on-usb".

Yeah, I did this too.  If this is on, it would certainly be a decent explanation of why your machine is draining so quickly while in S3.  If you actually make use of this feature, it is a pretty neat thing to have, but if you don't it is just sucking juice unnecessarily.

kevinmoilar

Member

Registered: 2015-11-07

Posts: 1

Re: power drains rapidly while sleeping during suspend-to-ram

@Abzstrak did you ever solve this issue on your System76 Galago Ultra Pro? I have the same laptop and the same issue, yet unresolved (also can't find a setting in BIOS to disable "always-on-usb" or similar).