Using Powertop to Lower System Power Usage

“Ever wonder what’s sucking the life out of your Linux laptop’s
battery or contributing to higher electric bills in the server
room? Check out Powertop, a tool for profiling a system to see what
is using the most power.

“Powertop was developed a few years ago to help profile systems
and see what could be done to make Linux better at power savings.
It was aimed primarily at laptops, as many folks would install
Linux on a laptop and then find out that battery performance was
far worse under Linux than Windows.

“You don’t even need to run Powertop to benefit from it. Some of
the most common power-gulping culprits are listed on the
LessWatts.org website. Many of these have been fixed in the
upstream projects that caused unnecessary wakeups (like ntp waking
up every second, or Pidgin checking every 5 seconds to check on
idle time).”

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