I'm surprised that the author hasn't mentioned the positive effect it has had. After upgrading the OS and seeing the new menu entries I reported a number of applications that would show up as using a lot of energy and within a few releases there was a change note usually mentioning some simple fix which dramatically reduces the wake up's of the application or removing a long running animation that didn't add any value. This little menu addition has probably helped the battery life for macbook users more than any other change.
I suspect that's the real reason why Apple is weighting wakeups heavily and exaggerating the energy impact: it shames developers into making their apps more efficient.
> Activity Monitor is a tool that was introduced in Mac OS X 10.9.
Activity Monitor was introduced with OS X 10.3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activity_Monitor). And was significantly revamped with OS X 10.9 to receive the various energy related measurements.
Wakeups are a bit tricky to actively measure, because with the Power Nap feature, the actual # of wakeups triggered by a particular application is a bit trickier to measure and varies based on what other activities are going on the system.
In general, from the get go, it is a bit of a myth that you can really know how much of a power budget is a consequence of a particular application. You can get a rough sense of relative impact on the overall power budget, but even that can be seriously skewed by a LOT of factors. At best, you can get a sense of, "if I sampled at the moment power stores hit a multiple of X, how often would I see the system doing something on behalf of each app that was draining power at that moment". Even that, is bloody hard to pull off, but it is your best "rough" approximation of what is going on.
I could have sworn I read somewhere that Activity Monitor also included GPU usage in its measurements—naturally, using the GPU more uses more power/battery.
> Recent Intel hardware provides high-quality estimates of processor and memory power consumption ... But the big problem is that they are machine-wide measures that cannot be used on a per-process basis.
Would it not be possible for the OS to poll the CPU for these power consumption stats, and attribute the value returned to the currently running process?
Over time, I think it would be possible to see how much power the Intel CPU thinks each process is using.
Work in bootstrapping energy consumption exists in academia; for example Pathak et al[0]. The changes in 10.10.4 could be an implementation of something along the same lines, by fitting a model to the measured power consumption.
As comex notes in the comments on the article, there appears to be a table of weights for various features, presumably obtained by regression.
Let me rephrase: There are temperature and battery charge sensors in the machines. We can use these to better calibrate the "virtual" energy usage metrics.
[+] [-] icefox|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qiushihe|10 years ago|reply
> Activity Monitor is a tool that was introduced in Mac OS X 10.9.
Activity Monitor was introduced with OS X 10.3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activity_Monitor). And was significantly revamped with OS X 10.9 to receive the various energy related measurements.
[+] [-] nnethercote|10 years ago|reply
Thank you for the suggestion.
[+] [-] cbsmith|10 years ago|reply
In general, from the get go, it is a bit of a myth that you can really know how much of a power budget is a consequence of a particular application. You can get a rough sense of relative impact on the overall power budget, but even that can be seriously skewed by a LOT of factors. At best, you can get a sense of, "if I sampled at the moment power stores hit a multiple of X, how often would I see the system doing something on behalf of each app that was draining power at that moment". Even that, is bloody hard to pull off, but it is your best "rough" approximation of what is going on.
[+] [-] ejdyksen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comex|10 years ago|reply
https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2015/08/26/what-does-th...
In the data I posted, which is from /usr/share/pmenergy/default.plist, kgpu_time is 0.0, but in all the other plists it's nonzero.
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zurn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grecy|10 years ago|reply
Would it not be possible for the OS to poll the CPU for these power consumption stats, and attribute the value returned to the currently running process?
Over time, I think it would be possible to see how much power the Intel CPU thinks each process is using.
[+] [-] nnethercote|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rainforest|10 years ago|reply
As comex notes in the comments on the article, there appears to be a table of weights for various features, presumably obtained by regression.
[0]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mzh/eurosys-2012....
[+] [-] travjones|10 years ago|reply
*POWER = "Energy Impact."
[+] [-] kevinchen|10 years ago|reply
Power = ((used_us + IDLEW * 500) * 100.0) / elapsed_us
If you believe that each idle wake costs you on average the same energy as 500us of computation, then the units are compatible right?
[+] [-] nnethercote|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digitalengineer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shalmanese|10 years ago|reply
Data: Settings->Cellular, scroll to the bottom
[+] [-] AnthonBerg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnthonBerg|10 years ago|reply
Let me rephrase: There are temperature and battery charge sensors in the machines. We can use these to better calibrate the "virtual" energy usage metrics.