Discord power usage on Linux

Summary

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Hey everybody, today I decided to do some testing of power levels for discord on Linux desktop. Mostly I wanted to test between the main discord app, the discord canary app(which uses a newer version of electron) and the discord web browser version as I found that the default discord app doesn’t let the cpu enter lower c-states.

I am using Librewolf as my browser and have installed discord and discord canary from there arch package and AUR package respectively. The modules that are installed are 2 USB-C, 1 USB type A and 1 DisplayPort. And optimizations are the ones done by powertop auto tune.

Method

I decided to for each of the setups test it 3 times using powertop to test it. I ran 3x each setup testing them for 240 seconds each time to give it time to equalize out and then averaged out the result.

The first setup is librewolf empty + discord canary, the second is librewolf empty + discord main, and the third is librewolf with discord web app. The results are posted below.

Results

  • Discord Canary + Librewolf : 5.6w
  • Discord Main + Librewolf : 6.6w
  • Librewolf Discord Webapp : 7.9w

I hope this guide has helped in terms of saving power on the Linux desktop as canary can quiet visibly make a noticeable difference on power usage in long sessions. Why this is I do not exactly know but we suspect it has something to do with older versions of electron having problems with higher C-states as the main discord app I do not see high c-states.

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have you tried discord canary with wayland? i tested it with --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform,WaylandWindowDecorations --ozone-platform=wayland. no idea if it makes it better or worse in terms of performance.

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@marco I have not tested wayland as I only tested X11, This would have to then become a more broad test what the diffrence is between wayland and X11 power usage but that’s something outside of the scope of this test. I would recommend you do your own testing if you want to find out.

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