Elena Elisseeva, 123RF.com
Identify troublesome energy consumers with PowerTOP
Energy Saver
When the CPU runs out of things to do, it automatically switches to one of several sleep states. Modern processes do this multiple times per second. The deeper the CPU sleeps, the less power it needs. For this reason, you should not wake it up until you really need to do so. Unfortunately, some arrogant processes and device drivers keep waking up the processor, thus adding to your electricity bill.
Detective Work
The PowerTOP tool identifies just these types of processes on Linux systems. It monitors all the active processes and device drivers, calculates their power consumption, and then shows you which ones are likely the biggest power wasters. Additionally, the internal database provides power-saving tips that PowerTOP will apply at the press of a button.
This feature gives laptop users in particular the ability to extend battery life, and it lets server operators reduce their energy costs, which is an important consideration if you happen to run a server farm. The tool also lets software developers test at an early stage to see whether or not their software interferes with the processor too often.
PowerTOP was created in 2007 by Intel and will run on AMD, ARM, and UltraSPARC processors with some restrictions. The tool is available under the free GPL v2 license and is now included by most major Linux distributions. However, older versions are typically in the repositories. More recent versions offer more power-saving tips, so you might want to download the current source code archive from the PowerTOP website [1] and build the tool yourself.
To do so, you'll need the C compiler, make, gettext, and the developer packages for libncursesw. Note that the w here is not a typo; it refers to the wide-character version of the popular ncurses
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