@gido5731 I skimmed your posts – get the baseline power draw of you system, at idle. Quit anything obvious that noticeably increases your CPU usage. Or better yet, all programs that you’ve installed on top of your base operating system.
You mentioned you get around 3.5-4w:
So, if that really was the idle power draw, then start and measure each program’s power draw one by one.
For example, from 4W idle (measuring with e.g. Powertop open):
- Start Discord
- Let it settle
- Look at what your new idle power draw is with Discord running in the background
- Let’s say it’s now 8.5W. You can safely guess that Discord uses and adds 3.5W to your total power draw (8.5W new idle - 4W old idle).
Rinse and repeat for your other running/background programs/processes. For some programs like browsers, rogue extensions could cause increased CPU usage/power draw, so you can use the same measuring method by disabling all extensions, and then enabling/measuring each one. Could be per website as well, etc.
After doing that, you’ll know roughly how much power your programs use. In the future, if your system is using abnormally high amounts of power, you’ll have something to check against.
You can also work in the reverse. For example, your system is idling at 14W. You know it should be idling at 3W. You quit Discord, it drops down to 10.5W. You can safely guess Discord uses 3.5W (14W old idle - 10.5W new idle). Or disable an extension, stop your music, close a specific website’s tab, etc.
With this method, you should be able to pinpoint exactly what’s causing the excess draw. This works with USB peripherals, programs, changing kernels, etc. You can make the decision if something’s power draw is worth keeping it running.
IME The Linux Discord client is not power efficient (haven’t measured in a while, may be better now), so I don’t keep it running. Probably poor Electron usage or the like, because VSCode uses Electron but can be very power efficient at idle.
Firefox and Chromium (and Edge, but unsure now since I haven’t used it in a very long time) are now all pretty power efficient at idle, with no heavy websites nor extensions, that even keeping all three open should only draw maybe 1-3W max (IME guesstimate). That’s with nothing happening, though. Once you have, say, some extension/website in Firefox constantly consuming CPU cycles, and another in Chrome, power draw can shoot up heavily.
I do mostly use Firefox with ~12 extensions (where I’ve ensured the extensions aren’t rogue power hungry omnomnom) and it can idle power efficiently even with a bunch of tabs.
What @truffaldino said, and likely that’s an inaccurate measurement from Powertop. It’s quite common, but it doesn’t mean that adapter is actually using that much power.
Some things to try in no particular order:
- Generate a report over time with Powertop (check
man powertop for usage) to check if something is using excess power.
- Roll back your TLP version, kernel version, any software updates, etc. to see if your sleep works with earlier versions – then you can reinstall the updated version to pinpoint if it broke it.
- Maybe a TLP update had breaking changes to the config and part of your TLP config file/settings is no longer valid.
- Maybe your systemd sleep config got messed up (or some other config).
- Checking logs with
journalctl and dmesg might clue you in to the cause.
- Maybe it’s hungry and needs some food!
