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Power OS X Operating Systems

Spotlight's Impact on PowerBook Battery Life? 161

Posted by Cliff from the hits-the-juice-pretty-hard dept.
Viltvodlian Deoderan asks: "So, Spotlight for Mac OS X Tiger is very cool. I can now let my innate ability to disorganize things shine through. However, when using my PowerBook unplugged, it seems that my battery lasts a noticeably less time. A close reading of Ars Technica's description of how spotlight works suggests that this is due to keeping the index file up-to-date on disk. Has anyone else noticed the same thing? Does someone have a better explanation for why my battery seems to drain out, prematurely? Is there some way real-time indexing can be turned off to conserve power?"
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Spotlight's Impact on PowerBook Battery Life? More

Spotlight's Impact on PowerBook Battery Life?

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  • Umm.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by imstanny ( 722685 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @09:47PM (#13344435)
    Try turning off the pr0n. you're welcome.
  • Depending on the time of day and what you are doing with your computer, power consumption varies a lot. It'd be difficult to even establish a reliable baseline usage time per charge.

    After you install, files are indexed as they are written. It really takes very cpu time or other resources to do this. If you don't believe me do some performance profiling.

    If you did an upgrade install, you are already working with a sorely fragmented disk. Additionally, batteries age. Maybe it's these two factors that are

  • Too bad my battery blows (Score:3, Informative)

    by MyDixieWrecked ( 548719 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @09:51PM (#13344470) Homepage Journal
    I actually noticed that my battery is lasting much, much less time, lately, but I've been attributing that to the fact that it's almost 3 years old and hasn't had the life that it used to when it was young.

    I wish there was a way of disabling spotlight during certain times. especially when I'm running a script that's creating dozens of files only to trash them again later. I think it's taking a bit of a performance hit from spotlight.

    • I wish there was a way of disabling spotlight during certain times. especially when I'm running a script that's creating dozens of files only to trash them again later. I think it's taking a bit of a performance hit from spotlight.

      Assuming your script always creates it's files in the same location, add that location to the privacy tab in Spotlight prefs. It should then ignore that directory.

      Here's some more info [thexlab.com]

    • I've noticed that lithium batteries sometimes degrade so rapidly (after 18 months or more of reliable service) that people sometimes associate the battery performance problem with some event -- a software upgrade or application install -- which was coincident with the battery demise. Sometimes they are so certain of the causality of the association that they won't buy a new battery.

      Once they finally do, they are thrilled to discover that it's like having a new laptop again, with nice long battery life.
      • The main problem here is that unlike NiCad and NiMH (or rather to a much greater extent) lithium ion rechargables start to lose their life the second they are manufactured. This is why you can always find a set of retailers selling them at a high price and another set selling them at a low price. If you buy a battery that has been sitting on the shelf a couple of years, it's going to have a dramatically lower capacity than a brand new one.

    • Here's a script to print out battery info... (Score:5, Informative)

      by porkchop_d_clown ( 39923 ) <mwheinz@nOSpAm.me.com> on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @11:35PM (#13344983)
      #!/bin/bash

      [ -x /usr/sbin/ioreg ] && \ /usr/sbin/ioreg -p IODeviceTree -n "battery" -w 0 | \
              sed -ne '/| *{/,/| *}/ {
                      s/^[ |]*//g /^[{}]/!p
              }' | \
              awk '/IOBatteryInfo/ {
                      A=$3 $4
                      gsub("[{}()\"]","", A)
                      gsub(","," ",A)
                      print($1, $2, A)
              }'
      # EOF

      Save that as a shell script, when you run it from terminal it will produce info like this:

      "IOBatteryInfo" = Capacity=4046 Amperage=1157 CycleCount=483 Current=2837 Voltage=12187 Flags=838860807 AbsoluteMaxCapacity=4400

      The difference between AbsoluteMaxCapacity and Capacity gives you an idea of how much my battery has faded since it was new...

  • Spotlight doesn't do that much work that I would honestly expect it to significantly impact battery life.

    Perhaps if you used spotlight to find all your files, as it would take some effort to search the index and list all the files. But I doubt you search for that many files in a session.

    It is far more likely there is another process which is effecting battery life, or your battery is starting to show some wear and tear.

    • Re:Spotlight? Could be anything (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @10:48PM (#13344755)
      No, I've experienced this too with a quite new iBook. Before Tiger I'd get battery life of just under 6 hours. Afterwards I'm lucky to get 5.

      I believe it's correctly attributed to Spotlight, as every now and again, even when the machine is sitting plugged in and resting on my kitchen counter, I can hear it whirl it's harddisk as if it's indexing.

      I would like a control panel applet to tune Spotlight, but I can wait. I already did my part in the deal (gave them an email and a submission on their website).

      And for the trolls of the world, Apple's not perfect either. This is the first time this kind of tool has been included in an operating system, and it's something that will take quite a bit of time to tune and work out correctly. To be honest, in all of my works to do something similar, I've came out with the same results to a much lower quality, and any tool I've seen to do the same will probably harm my battery's life even more.

      • Re:Spotlight? Could be anything (Score:4, Informative)

        by ActionGaz ( 785164 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @01:46AM (#13345502)
        I believe it's correctly attributed to Spotlight, as every now and again, even when the machine is sitting plugged in and resting on my kitchen counter, I can hear it whirl it's harddisk as if it's indexing.
        That's not how Spotlight works. When you first installed Tiger it needed to go through all the existing files and index them, but that process is surely done by now.

        All it does now is respond to new files being created or files being changed. It doesn't need to scan for these as it is told directly by the operating system when the changes take place.

        The constant disk access must be some other process.

    • spotlight needs to acces hd.. ..which in turn needs to keep it spinning.

  • To answer your question (Score:5, Informative)

    by amichalo ( 132545 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @10:00PM (#13344511)
    From here [macworld.com]:
    To turn indexing on or off for a volume, run sudo mdutil -i on volume name or sudo mdutil -i off volume name, respectively. For example, if you want to turn off indexing for a volume called Backup, the command would be sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/Backup .

    Now to give you some grief about it:
    This is pretty basic stuff - the less the hardware is used, the less power it will consume. If Spotlight, or any other app, is accessing the disk, then it will need power to do so. Likewise, if Spotlight is doing a bunch of searching through it's index that has to be loaded into RAM from the disk and those queries must be computed by the OS, then the disk and OS and RAM are all getting a workout.

    What I recommend is that you check out what it is you are doing. If you are copy and moving files all over the place, or mounting and unmounting CDs, those processes would cause HD/CD usage as well as Spotlight indexing on top of that. Likewise, if you are doing a lot of Spotlight searching, there will be more usage because you are querying a DBMS.

    Perhaps your battery is just coincidentally needed a replacement and/or non-spotlight related OS tweeks are changing power consumption.
    • Something like enabling / disabling indexing for specific drives/volumes should have been exposed in the preferences pane as such, not terminal commands.

      On the other hand, while a tad less intuitive, you could go to the "privacy" tab in the spotlight preference pane and enter or drag volumes / folders and possibly files that you don't want indexed, drag them back out if you need them to be indexed.

    • Re:To answer your question (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This is pretty basic stuff - the less the hardware is used, the less power it will consume. If Spotlight, or any other app, is accessing the disk, then it will need power to do so. Likewise, if Spotlight is doing a bunch of searching through it's index that has to be loaded into RAM from the disk and those queries must be computed by the OS, then the disk and OS and RAM are all getting a workout.

      What I recommend is that you check out what it is you are doing

      What I recommend is that you read the Ars T [arstechnica.com]

    • Re:To answer your question (Score:5, Informative)

      by Goo.cc ( 687626 ) * on Thursday August 18, 2005 @12:05AM (#13345090)
      One time I noticed was Spotlight causing me trouble was when compiling applications in my home directory. (I guess it was trying to keep up with the compiler as it created files.) I didn't want to turn off indexing on the whole volume, so I created a folder called "Src.noindex", as any folder with a .noindex extension is not indexed by Spotlight. This solved my problem.

      It should be noted that although you can turn off the Spotlight service itself, using the above mentioned "sudo mdutil -i off /volname" is much better, as you will still be able to find things by filename. Turning off the Spotlight service disables finding completely, by content or filename.
      • You can disable indexing for a particular folder in System Preferences (the privacy tab in Spotlight settings). I have done this with ~/tmp for compiling etc.
    • What I recommend is that you check out what it is you are doing.

      You blame the user's perception of a difference in battery life post OS upgrade to their usage habits? The user's work habits completely changed on an OS upgrade? I particularly like the implied solution that the user shouldn't do any work. Better: just turn it off and leave it plugged in at home. Lots of juice in the battery then.

      Here's a clue: One big rule is to keep the hard drive spun down as much as possible. To this end, laptops and
      • You blame the user's perception of a difference in battery life post OS upgrade to their usage habits? The user's work habits completely changed on an OS upgrade?

        My usage habits have changed as OSes have been upgraded. I use Dashboard and Spotlight all the time now. Whereas before I used Apps like Calculator and Safari to hit maps.google.com, I have widgets. I don't browse all over my hard drive looking for files because I have "smart folders" from Spotlight.

        Hell, even when I used Windows and Linux my useag
        • My usage habits have changed as OSes have been upgraded. I use Dashboard and Spotlight all the time now.

          Which is exactly what I didn't mean. The kinds of high-level tasks a user engages in are rather unlikely to have changed as a result of an OS upgrade alone. E.g. things such as "developing Ruby code", "playing music", or "working on a video project", etc. In your case, these are "doing arithmetic" and "checking a map". The apps involved should be irrelevant, especially in this case. Why? Because whe

  • I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10.4 (Score:4, Informative)

    by porkchop_d_clown ( 39923 ) <mwheinz@nOSpAm.me.com> on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @10:10PM (#13344554)
    I've got half a gig, but I'm swapping constantly and apps like Safari regularly swell to consume all available RAM.

    Widgets that access the internet regularly consume a hundred megs of swap and mdimport will start eating processor at random moments. Mail.app regularly tries to index the hundreds of thousands of files on my company's Exchange server and comes to a screeching halt.

    Frankly, Tiger's been a major disappointment.
    • Well, half a gig is what I'd call the bare minimum for an operating system like OS X anyways. People might cry foul, but Windows XP isn't really usable at under that notch either, as I can currently tell you, running Windows XP on a box with 192 megs of ram and crying every time I try to close winamp.

      Widgets really aren't that big a harm, unless you install and use a hundred of them. Frankly, on my iBook, I use 3 widgets, and could live without 2 of them (the TV guide I won't give up).

      Mail.app has nev
      • Frankly, 512 megs was more than usable with Panther; my wife's ibook with 256 was fine, if a little sluggish. Tiger has effectively forced me to cut back on how much I do with my Powerbook.

        I wouldn't mind the memory requirements if they were worthwhile but - as I said and you seem to confirm - 150 megs of virtual memory so you can view your netflix queue seems a bit extreme.
        • Nah, my iBook with 256 was barely usable in my own opinion, but it also had far fewer features under Panther that I really like about Tiger.

          I didn't really confirm the widget memory usage either.. my machine really doesn't use too terribly much to deal with Dashboard, but I guess YMMV. Secondly, as I have 1,256MB of ram, and as it wasn't very expensive in view of the cost of the entire platform, I don't really notice too much anymore when it comes to memory. My machine performs very well for most every d
          • I write code for Macs and Linux for a living so I need Tiger to ensure compatibility.

            They *did* do a lot of nice stuff at the system level - launchd is interesting if a pain (because it adds a new barrier to making Linux system enhancements work with Mac) but they threw so much new syntactic sugar on top of everything as to force a migration to Intel just to get faster chips. ;-P

            Tiger's new Sync model also broke the Exchange/iCal sync program I was using (groupcal), and caused a mysterious new bug in an op
      • My problem:

        Each widget consumes 20MB of RAM, then consume a lot more of virtual memory. Some third party widgets don't know how to put themselves to sleep when Dashboard is off, so they continue to take CPU power.

        Even on a system with 1.5GB RAM, I just decided to not use Dashboard, there are too many memory hogs and Dashboard really isn't useful enough. I think using Quicksilver to call up certain web sites and apps is quicker anyway.
      • I've got 768MB RAM in my 1GHz Powerbook and I'm still suffering memory issues.

        I've been forced to slim down to only one widget left running (although I have several more that I'd really like to keep open constantly), and to keep an eye on the number of apps I have resident at any particular time.

        I had no such memory concerns under Panther. I would have thought 768MB would be ample, but it appears not. I'm looking to move to 1GB RAM, and hoping that Apple continue to clean up Tiger.

        The 10.4.2 update consider
        • I also have 768mb in my 1.3 ghz powerboook. I don't have any of the problems you people are describing.

          I ahve a half a dozen widgets, itunes, safari(or firefox) is always runningI use fire for IM'ing and that is always up as well as iterm. I then start a game up and still nothing stutters. Heck I can run Photoshop with it and nothing happens.

          The one bug I have found is that Safari has a probelm letting go of threads once they are formed. So after a week of runing non stop it has 40-50 threads on it's ow

          • Re:I've had a lot of problems with my PB since 10. (Score:4, Informative)

            by hattig ( 47930 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @07:22AM (#13346261) Journal
            I have 512MB in my iBook, and I never noticed issues when running Dashboard, Mail, Safari, Terminal, etc, at the same time. Hell even running Eclipse it wasn't too bad, except waking up from sleep.

            What I have done though is turn off Dashboard, and I'm going to write an application to log the battery power using ioreg (from a post above) from a full charge, then compare it to running with Dashboard from a full charge.
            • I initially went for 768MB RAM because I run a lot of concurrent applications. Right now (normal use) I have these applications resident:

              Safari, NewsFire, Sciral Consistency, iCal, Mail, Adium, Colloquy, iTunes, Activity Monitor, XCode.

              I also used to run a local apache+postgresql dev environment, under Panther. 768MB RAM was still ample for this workload. But yes, Tiger has higher memory requirements and my usage is perhaps heavier than that of an average user :(
            • X-Charge [macupdate.com] probably does exactly what you are planning on writing.

              Unless you really want to write it... then nevermind.

      • Widgets use a ton of memory, even when Dashboard is inactive. (I've never seen one that uses CPU time, but other posters have claimed that some do.) Activity Monitor claims my 5 widgets use ~20MB physical/~140MB virtual each. Why? /bangs head

        But if you never launch Dashboard, the widgets don't load.

        Tiger has slightly shortened battery life on my 1.5GHz 12" 'Book (from 3:30 or so to 3:10 or so in my usual use). I haven't gone digging to find out why, but I'm suspicious of changes at a deeper level than S

      • False (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Moraelin ( 679338 )
        "Well, half a gig is what I'd call the bare minimum for an operating system like OS X anyways. People might cry foul, but Windows XP isn't really usable at under that notch either"

        False. Windows XP runs great in 512 MB RAM.

        "as I can currently tell you, running Windows XP on a box with 192 megs of ram and crying every time I try to close winamp."

        How about comparing apples to apples? You're comparing an 192 MB RAM machine with XP, to a 512 MB RAM machine with Tiger. We're talking more that 2.5 times differenc
    • my sister just got an ibook, when I first started it up to help her set it up it had the stock half gig and it was swapping like crazy. I added a second half gig (corsair) sim I grabbed from new egg and, eureka! performance went through the roof.

      My powerbook has had one gig from the beginning, and I havent had any probs. Tiger's pretty memory hungry, perhaps you should grad another half gig. The sim I got from new egg was around 50 bucks, so good deal. Check it out.
    • I had the same issues running Panther on my Powerbook, which also had 512 MB of RAM. I upgraded to 1.25 GB, and it's been running much better.
    • You're not alone. My 768 MB iBook G4 has suffered a performance downgrade with Tiger, frequently swapping like mad, although matters have improved quite a lot since I disabled Dashboard entirely.

      Safari also eats memory, and benefits from a regular termination and restart.

      Tiger's Mail is deeply flawed, especially when dealing with IMAP accounts. It often freezes when receiving new IMAP messages. It deletes IMAP emails without moving them to the Trash properly (settings to the contrary regardless), so I ha

  • Easy (Score:5, Informative)

    by neurotypical ( 883239 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @10:17PM (#13344593)
    Drag the volume you don't want indexed into the Privacy pane in Spotlight preferences.
    • That doesn't work for me for some folders. I'm not sure, but I think the connection is system owned folders versus user owned. At any rate, my attempts to exclude the /tmp/ folder from Spotlight are routinely foiled. But isn't that folder supposed to be excluded automatically anyway? Why do I get iTunes temp files in my results? I've tried flushing my index, and I'm on a clean install-- what's the deal?

  • Disable Dashboard and Spotlight here (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @11:02PM (#13344834)
    DisableTigerFeatures 1.0.3 - FREE

    http://software.filkifan.com/ [filkifan.com]

    Mighty Mouse dissected detailed pictures and 76 widgets at once

    http://homepage.mac.com/hogfish/PhotoAlbum2.html [mac.com]

    Watching my DotMac bandwidth get Slashmelted - PRICELESS

  • Have you confirmed it? (Score:5, Informative)

    by jhealy1024 ( 234388 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @11:09PM (#13344866)
    I'm not saying that it *isn't* Spotlight, but just about anything could be chewing up your battery. Widgets, indexing, screen savers, or even poor Engergy Saver settings. Have you checked to make sure that Spotlight is what's killing your battery?

    Several people have been complaining about a bug in Tiger and the 2005 Powerbooks that has to do with the trackpad:

    http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050 808165343661 [macosxhints.com]

    It seems that the new tracking features eat up a lot of processor time (and thus, a lot of battery as well).

    Again, I'm not dissing the Spotlight issue: it's definitely something to look at. But if you're still having trouble, you might check on other factors that can kill your battery life.

  • If you just got 10.4, ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by daviddennis ( 10926 ) <david@amazing.com> on Thursday August 18, 2005 @12:34AM (#13345205) Homepage
    it's possible that it's still indexing your entire volume, which might take a long time if you have a PowerBook with a high capacity drive.

    I know that performance on my dual 2ghz G5 with 5gb RAM took a huge hit for about the first 24 hours after I installed Tiger. I have a lot of disk space (almost 2TB) hung off my machine, thus the long indexing time.

    Once that's over, the other replies are right - Spotlight doesn't take up much in the way of resources. But during the initial index, the hit's pretty big and it would not surprise me if it hurt battery life too.

    D
    • I've heard varying accounts of just how long the indexing process ACTUALLY takes. Some have stated that even though the Spotlight icon in the menubar indicates it's ready for use, indexing is actually still continuing, and can do so for quite some time.

      The problem is, with casual use of the computer while this is happening, indexing periods can drag for hours in the background. Some people have recommended a complete reindexing should be done at night while you're not using your computer, to ensure the
      • I think the clue behind these varying times is that what you really need to do is plug in your laptop and turn off sleep. Then it will run overnight, but it's way too easy to never think to turn off sleep. Under those circumstances with light use of the computer it could take literally weeks to do the indexing!

        D

  • Swapping and slow disk. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BigZaphod ( 12942 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @12:51AM (#13345276) Homepage
    It seems like ever since I switched to Tiger my PB has been much more prone to long swapping sessions like I've seen Windows boxes do. Plus, moving large files around seems far slower. I have 1GB Ram and 1.67Ghz processor and the system feels quite slow compared to Panther at times. It is very frustrating to say the least. I upgraded from a 1Ghz TiBook which ran Panther and it feels like I downgraded a lot of the time. Anyone know if there's a solution to this? And why the hell does flash take 100% CPU even for small banner ads? That drives me crazy.

  • What about Dashboard? (Score:3, Informative)

    by blamanj ( 253811 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @01:16AM (#13345392)
    Don't some of the widgets run more or less all the time? I also recall seeing that some of the first versions had serious memory leaks, in which case you'd be swapping more frequently as well.
    • Don't some of the widgets run more or less all the time? I also recall seeing that some of the first versions had serious memory leaks, in which case you'd be swapping more frequently as well.

      I can confirm that one of the first versions would get into a state where it would eat up all available CPU. Unfortunately, they all show up with the same name under top, and I wasn't thinking and didn't try to view complete command lines... This seems to have stopped since 10.4.2.
    • More importantly, each widget uses around 20MB of REAL memory. If this pushes you over the threshold where you need to do a lot of swapping then your disk will spend a lot of time spun-up and this will kill battery life.

  • not Spotlight's fault, it's a problem with OS X (Score:5, Informative)

    by wilton ( 20843 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @01:59AM (#13345540)
    Read this:

    http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050 808165343661 [macosxhints.com]

    It is actually a bug with the driver for the new USB scrolling trackpad. This has been noted in various forums and Apple are aware of this problem.

    If you plug in an external mouse and disable the trackpad, or replace the driver with SideTrack, the problem goes away.

    This only effects the 2005 Powerbooks, and causes much higher CPU and memory load.

    Will
    • The new iBooks also use the scrolling trackpad, so I imagine that it will be a problem for them as well?

      My new iBook says it has 4 hours and 40 minutes of battery currently (just removed the power cord from a full charge). This is less than the 6 hours I expected of it, although 4.7 hours is still pretty good. I wonder if it would increase if I installed SideTrack?
  • it's funny, I've actually noticed longer battery life under tiger. I attribute it to turning off dashbaord though, as it seems to have started around then. I wrote myself a small applescript to turn it off/on after I noticed my battery life seemed to go down on tiger from panther. Afterwards it shot back up, perhaps it's not spotlight, but dashboard....

  • Could be Dashboard - Try This Command (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jackdaw Rookery ( 696327 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:51AM (#13345833) Homepage Journal
    Open Terminal and type this command, followed by return:

    defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

    Restart the dock, dashboard is dead.

    To get dashboard back type:

    defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

  • It's not spotlight (Score:4, Informative)

    by kataflok ( 836910 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @04:01AM (#13345856)
    Spotlight put the machine through hell for a few days while it indexed everything it could find -- then it went to sleep.

    Dashboard was eating battery life by 20% and increasing wait times on certain apps significantly -- that is until I killed it. Battery life instantly jumped right back up.

    Spotlight is a one off issue that lasts about a day -- Dashboard is the ongoing PITA.

  • To turn Spotlight off... (Score:5, Informative)

    by MrPerfekt ( 414248 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @09:43AM (#13346941) Homepage Journal
    Add this to /etc/hostconfig:

    SPOTLIGHT=-NO-

    Reboot, and you're done. The indexing service won't even load at boot. The spotlight icon will still be in the corner but will do absolutely nothing when you type in a string.

    And by the way, a watched pot also never boils. I think you're just imagining that it's sucking up all your battery. But hey, it may use a few extra cycles and use up your battery a little quicker.

  • CPU Load A Possible Factor, Watching Energy Use (Score:3, Interesting)

    by camperslo ( 704715 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @12:26PM (#13348370)
    I haven't yet used a meter to see how much the power comsumption is going up, but through use of the menubar utility Menu Meters, I've caught CPU use being unexpectedly high at times. Even without meausuring the power I'm certain that it increases, as my old TiBook fires up the fan after these periods of high CPU activity.

    The primary source of unexpected CPU load for me turned out to be certain animated banner/skyscraper animated ads. I haven't looked at page source to figure out just what they were, but I suspect Flash. Reloading pages and getting the ads to change has brought the CPU use back to very low levels while sitting on a page. I've even seen these high-cpu ads on Slashdot at times.

    Although I haven't seen a problem with any Apple-supplied Dashboard Widgets, some third-party widgets use more CPU than I'd expect when they're in the background.

    The Options section of the Energy Saver control panel allows setting reduced processor performance. That helps too. Separate settings are available for battery and adaptor operation. I find myself using the "reduced" setting even for adaptor operation at times just because I don't like the computer to get so hot. It's fine on a glass desktop or coffee table, but really cooks on a bedspread!

    Activity Monitor should help spot processes that are using the CPU heavily. It and Menu Meters can show disk activity also, but I haven't found a way to tell which processes are using the disk. I haven't noticed much activity I'd attribute to Spotlight, except when first connecting a Firewire drive.

    It is very easy to see what's going on with power consumption if you measure the power going into the AC adaptor (best done when you've reached the fully charged state, but you can still see changes while charging).

    I use a small meter I picked up at Radio Shack called the "Kill A Watt". It makes it very easy to see how much effect things like screen brightness settings have (a bunch).

    I think many on Slashdot would find one of those meters useful. They're very handy for spotting things around the house that use power even when off. Using one was enough to get me to swap most of my generic AC adaptors with transformers for the variety with switching supplies (most easily identified by their lower weight).
    Tests revealed that even my soldering stations had the transformer cores energized when "off". I rewired them to put the power switch before the transformer instead of after. Metering also easily showed the effects of over (and under) clocking PCs here. Watching power consumption everywhere not only helps laptop battery life, but the environment and the the budget. A fast and dirty rule of thumb I use for estimating cost is $1 a month for every 10 Watts that's consumed 24 hours a day. (Those AC adaptors, cable/satellite boxes, routers, VCRs, microwave ovens, doorbells, thermostats, amplified speakers, remote-control devices etc are probably all using some power all the time!)
    • Activity Monitor should help spot processes that are using the CPU heavily.

      you betcha ! Crank up some old moldy (and poorly behaved) system 7/8 app under classic. See if you can get it to crash (which shouldn't be all that difficult). Then kick back and watch 'truBlueEnvironment' red-line the CPU usage on Activity Monitor. weeeeeeeee!

    • Konfabulator widgets seem to be WAY less CPU-intensive than Dashboard.

      I've noticed that other programs that have gone to webkit from doing straight Aqua/Quartz layout have become slower and more CPU-hungry. It makes sense, Webkit is doing a lot more work, and it's got to re-render a lot more material when a script change changes the content.
  • My TiBook had great battery life. 4 hours of use. Nice.

    My 1ghz 15" Albook is lucky to manage 2.5hrs, and that's with a new battery. Perhaps the 12" model with a smaller screen might be a little better.

    I've considered going back to a older TiBook running linux, not OSX, for long trips on the road with frequent battery use. I wish Apple would address this; I suspect it is a problem borne out of the choice and clock rate of chip. I'll be very happy when a intel mobile is available - if I don't get a T21 thinkp
    • I wish Apple would address this; I suspect it is a problem borne out of the choice and clock rate of chip.

      They did - it's the main reason they're moving to Intel chips; they couldn't get PPC chips with the power characteristics they needed.
  • I get about 3.5 hours battery life on this machine with a two-year old battery. Web, email, some development, playing iTunes over Airport Express...

  • battery usage (Score:2, Informative)

    by chivo243 ( 808298 )
    try lowering the brightness level of the screen, and having your screen go to sleep quickly... power management

  • Ow my battery (Score:3, Funny)

    by imsoclever ( 901691 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @03:35PM (#13350200)
    Yeah powering a spotlight with my PowerBook really drains the battery.
  • It's not JUST spotlight.

    Tiger uses 3D acceleration for lots more basic gui stuff than Panther did. The laptop graphics chips run hot and drain power. Them being constantly in use for basic stuff is what makes Tiger drain the battery faster. As the chip is running all the time the fan is in use more often which drains the battery even faster. This was really noticeable on my Tibook when I installed Tiger.

    Apple needs to add an option in Energy Saver to drop back to software for everything when running on b
  • Spotlight sees the Entourage database as one large file. Everytime you download a single piece of email spam, the entire database file changes and Spotlight tries to reindex the whole thing, over and over again. If you have Entourage open and set to check your mail every 20 minutes, you force Spotlight to reindex a ~1GB file containing every email message on your computer every 20 min.

    Spotlight can't see into Entourage anyway, so you aren't loosing any functionality by telling Spotlight to ignore that

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