random($foo) is the occassionally still updated blog of Leonard Lin. My pics are on Flickr, code is on Github. @lhl on Twitter. More »
Since I’m using a new browser, had to re-add custom rules to block Southwest Airline’s obnoxious header injection. (They slap a bar on top of every single HTTP page while you surf – this is *after* paying for it). Here’s the adblock rule I’m using:
connected.southwestwifi.com/unb/*
The “Energy Impact” tab in OS X 10.9 Mavericks’ Activity Monitor is exactly what I would’ve wanted when I was testing my new Macbook Air a few months ago. Although, one thing I’ve found is that the “Avg Energy Impact” (it averages over the past 8 hours) isn’t actually a very useful/stable number, at least for measuring something that can have a very variable/spiky usage, like browsing with lots of tabs.
I knew if it was in Activity Monitor though, that the raw data must be available, and after some fruitless online searching, I just dug around my system and ended up finding some cool stuff in /usr/bin. First is a script called power_usage.sh that dumps out a report of lots of technical details.
Here’s a small sample of the output:
**** Battery and backlight usage **** Backlight level: 862 (range 0-1024) **** Network activity **** out: 1.00 packets/s, 94.29 bytes/s in: 1.50 packets/s, 212.53 bytes/s **** Disk activity **** read: 0.00 ops/s 0.00 KBytes/s write: 5.49 ops/s 32.70 KBytes/s **** Interrupt distribution **** CPU 0: Vector 0x46(SMC): 2.99 interrupts/sec Vector 0x49(MacBookAir6,1): 0.50 interrupts/sec Vector 0x92(IGPU): 107.76 interrupts/sec Vector 0x98(ARPT): 9.48 interrupts/sec Vector 0x9e(SSD0): 3.99 interrupts/sec Vector 0xdd(TMR): 691.96 interrupts/sec Vector 0xde(IPI): 8.98 interrupts/sec CPU 1: Vector 0xdd(TMR): 6.49 interrupts/sec Vector 0xde(IPI): 3.99 interrupts/sec CPU 2: Vector 0xdd(TMR): 16.46 interrupts/sec Vector 0xde(IPI): 8.98 interrupts/sec CPU 3: Vector 0xdd(TMR): 8.48 interrupts/sec Vector 0xde(IPI): 2.49 interrupts/sec **** Processor usage **** Intel energy model derived package power (CPUs+GT+SA): 0.58W LLC flushed residency: 93.2% System Average frequency as fraction of nominal: 85.75% (1457.75 Mhz) Package 0 C-state residency: 93.81% (C2: 13.45% C3: 0.07% C6: 0.00% C7: 80.29% C8: 0.00% C9: 0.00% C10: 0.00% ) Core 0 C-state residency: 96.16% (C3: 0.00% C6: 0.00% C7: 96.16% ) CPU 0 duty cycles/s: active/idle [< 16 us: 20.45/11.47] [< 32 us: 7.98/15.96] [< 64 us: 70.34/13.47] [< 128 us: 23.45/11.97] [< 256 us: 14.97/6.49] [< 512 us: 18.46/2.00] [< 1024 us: 4.99/4.49] [< 2048 us: 3.49/8.98] [< 4096 us: 2.00/12.97] [< 8192 us: 0.00/24.45] [< 16384 us: 0.00/26.94] [< 32768 us: 0.00/26.94] CPU Average frequency as fraction of nominal: 77.55% (1318.39 Mhz) CPU 1 duty cycles/s: active/idle [< 16 us: 15.47/4.49] [< 32 us: 1.00/2.49] [< 64 us: 2.99/2.00] [< 128 us: 1.50/0.50] [< 256 us: 4.49/1.00] [< 512 us: 1.00/1.50] [< 1024 us: 1.00/1.50] [< 2048 us: 0.50/0.50] [< 4096 us: 0.00/0.50] [< 8192 us: 0.00/2.49] [< 16384 us: 0.00/2.99] [< 32768 us: 0.00/0.00] CPU Average frequency as fraction of nominal: 83.51% (1419.63 Mhz) Core 1 C-state residency: 96.81% (C3: 0.01% C6: 0.00% C7: 96.81% ) CPU 2 duty cycles/s: active/idle [< 16 us: 68.35/4.49] [< 32 us: 8.98/5.49] [< 64 us: 5.49/17.96] [< 128 us: 6.49/12.97] [< 256 us: 7.98/13.47] [< 512 us: 2.99/7.48] [< 1024 us: 2.00/2.49] [< 2048 us: 1.00/2.49] [< 4096 us: 0.00/0.50] [< 8192 us: 0.50/7.98] [< 16384 us: 0.00/9.98] [< 32768 us: 0.50/7.98] CPU Average frequency as fraction of nominal: 94.05% (1598.86 Mhz) CPU 3 duty cycles/s: active/idle [< 16 us: 9.48/1.50] [< 32 us: 2.00/2.49] [< 64 us: 0.50/2.00] [< 128 us: 3.99/0.00] [< 256 us: 1.00/1.50] [< 512 us: 1.50/0.50] [< 1024 us: 1.00/0.50] [< 2048 us: 0.00/0.00] [< 4096 us: 0.50/0.50] [< 8192 us: 0.50/0.00] [< 16384 us: 0.00/2.99] [< 32768 us: 0.00/1.50] CPU Average frequency as fraction of nominal: 96.73% (1644.44 Mhz) **** GPU usage **** GPU 0 name IntelIG GPU 0 C-state residency: 99.73% (0.00%, 99.73%) GPU 0 P-state residency: 1100MHz: 0.00%, 1050MHz: 0.00%, 1000MHz: 0.00%, 950MHz: 0.00%, 900MHz: 0.00%, 850MHz: 0.00%, 800MHz: 0.00%, 750MHz: 0.00%, 700MHz: 0.00%, 650MHz: 0.00%, 600MHz: 0.00%, 550MHz: 0.00%, 500MHz: 0.00%, 450MHz: 0.00%, 400MHz: 0.00%, 350MHz: 0.28%, 300MHz: 0.00%, 250MHz: 0.00%, 200MHz: 0.00% GPU 0 average frequency as fraction of nominal (200.00Mhz): 0.49% (0.98Mhz) GPU 0 GPU Busy 0.28% GPU 0 FB Test Case 0.00%
Most of the best stuff is coming from /usr/bin/powermetrics. Here's the man page for powermetrics. There's a lot of options to go through.
I couldn't get some of the --hide flags to work, but here's a quick command to pull just the power score from some apps. Suffice to say, the possibilities for this in doing power comparison are quite tantalizing:
powermetrics -i 1000 --poweravg 1 | grep 'Average cumulatively decayed power score' -A 20
Example output:
--
**** Average cumulatively decayed power score ****
15 sec 1 min 5 min 15 min 1 hr
[26367]systemstats 157.144 43.3773 15.5405
[0 ]kernel_task 74.2694 74.8748 47.8391
[-1 ]DEAD_TASKS 48.8577 24.5274 6.72759
[123 ]WindowServer 30.0174 35.1636 21.6378
[388 ]iTerm 21.9219 20.0339 12.7875
[26917]Airmail 18.7339 19.6338 9.45401
[41829]Google Chrome He 10.6604 7.92617 4.61903
[42323]com.apple.WebKit 10.1828 17.2152 13.345
[41206]Safari 9.1336 16.8081 10.7422
[42352]Activity Monitor 7.60748 6.4298 3.80237
[96 ]hidd 7.59 7.70318 4.438
[42612]powermetrics 4.74147 4.81903 3.23933
[37370]SystemUIServer 4.36079 4.44251 3.02667
[159 ]sysmond 3.80035 2.93568 1.85484
[442 ]Moom 3.53523 2.59021 1.21046
[389 ]Dock 3.43152 2.84213 1.58266
I also made another cool discovery for power measurement. Originally I first tried to see if Apple's top had the power information, but sadly, it appeared like it didn't. Well, it turns out that (and the top man page) was wrong - my 11" MBA's screen simply wasn't big enough (even maximized) to show the POWER column, opening top open on my bigger desktop screen showed that this wasn't the case!
So here's an equivalent "power" command for top:
top -stats pid,command,power -o power -l 0
And the output looks something like:
PID COMMAND POWER 123 WindowServer 31.1 388 iTerm 25.7 42689 top 10.5 96 hidd 2.9 26917 Airmail 1.4 37370 SystemUIServer 0.4 45 fseventsd 0.3 85 mds 0.1 42323 com.apple.WebKit 0.1 31927- Dropbox 0.1 31997 WebKitPluginHost 0.1 453- Google Drive 0.1
It'd be pretty cool to make an open source power measuring/graphing framework combined w/ a browser automation test suite. I might get to it one day, but maybe someone w/ some more free time might feel like doing it sooner? Just putting it out there.
Bonus points for excellent soundtrack selection.
One of the things that Activity Monitor’s “Energy Impact” fields have made obvious is that Safari 7.0 is significantly more energy efficient than both Chrome 30.0 or Firefox 27a1.
After regular usage, Safari has an Average Energy Impact of about 4-5 5-6 vs Chrome and Firefox hovering at about 8-9. For comparison: Airmail averages about 3, Spotlight is about 2, and Dropbox 0.75. Playing a 720p H.264 MOV in Quicktime Player is about a 9, and playing a 720 H.264 MKV in VLC is 20+.
Recently I’ve been migrating away from Chrome and back to Firefox, as the former has gotten more sluggish, and the latter has gotten a lot faster (Chrome is still my preferred browser for dev and the only option for SSBs), which actually has left me in a good place to try switching to Safari, as I’ve pared down my “necessary” plugins:
I also am using QuickStyle for Safari, which is like Stylish for Firefox or Stylebot for Chrome, but that’s more of a nice-to-have.
The most annoying thing I’ve found so far with using Safari, and probably the biggest reason I’ve never stuck with it, is that CMD 1-9 are mapped to the bookmarks bar and not switching tabs. It’s confounding (especially as I hide and don’t even use the bookmarks bar).
The solution for this is a SIMBL plugin called SafariTabSwitching – there is an installer on the Github page so installing is a snap, and the latest version is updated for Mavericks and is working great.
There are still a couple other niggles (only a single tab unclose), tab-close focusing is different, both Chrome and Firefox have a very useful contextual status bar (ie, when you mouseover a link, the URL shows up in the bottom left), so we’ll have to see if switching to Safari gives enough battery life to make it worth it. I’ll probably be updating this in a week or two w/ how it turns out.