Measure, explain and minimize a computer's electrical power consumption

sudo powertop

Run this command as root to get enough stats. It works on AMD and Intel machines, including desktops. If ran on a laptop it'll give you suggestions on extending your battery life. You'll need to install PowerTOP if you don't have, via 'apt-get install powertop', etc. To grep the output use: sudo powertop -d | grep ... The many command suggestions PowerTOP gives you alone will increase your command-line fu!

Sample Output

Top causes for wakeups:
  32.1% (291.8)           firefox : hrtimer_start_range_ns (hrtimer_wakeup) 

Suggestion: increase the VM dirty writeback time from 5.00 to 15 seconds with:
  echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs 
This wakes the disk up less frequently for background VM activity

Suggestion: Enable SATA ALPM link power management via: 
  echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy
or press the S key.

Suggestion: Disable 'hal' from polling your cdrom with:  
hal-disable-polling --device /dev/cdrom 'hal' is the component that auto-opens a
window if you plug in a CD but disables SATA power saving from kicking in.

By: rkulla

2010-04-19 21:59:29

sudo battery power intel amd powertop

Submit An Alternative

What Others Think

rkulla++

linuxrawkstar · 685 weeks and 1 day ago

very interesting, congratulations

0disse0 · 680 weeks and 3 days ago

useful lessons. Thank you for sharing! friday night funkin

Farrah0987 · 72 weeks and 4 days ago

seofox · 69 weeks and 6 days ago

seofox · 69 weeks ago

rahimhh21 · 39 weeks and 6 days ago

Perfecthomepugs · 31 weeks and 1 day ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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