As you see in the screenshot, the Network Interface is the process using the most battery power.
I have seen it peaks anything between 4-4.5 watt at times. I wonder if there may be some configuration to be done to tweak for power efficiency and less battery consumption.
Paradoxically, in my search, I have seen some recommendation to disable power saving for the network interface, arguing that by putting the device into a low-power state when it is idle, this can reduce the transmission power, turning off unnecessary components, or entering sleep modes and therefore if the device frequently switches between active and low-power states, it might consume more power due to the overhead of transitioning states.
Forgive me if I have not got right all the technical details of the matter. I appreciate your comments and to know your opinion about this and possible measures.
Good question. Which I’m sadly not able to investigate myself. As PowerTop 2.15 doesn’t provide me any power estimates (desktop system). Only my intuition does say: No, I can’t be worse than a Wifi interface.
But I’m pretty certain that you could reduce the power consumption of your WiFi interface indirectly via the router level. Wifi 6 should be better in terms of energy efficiency than the prior standards. If you don’t have Wifi 6 as an option, the rule of thumb would be: If you dial back the transmission rate - i.e. only distribute a 802.11g network from the router. The 2.4GHz should be sufficient for most uses, in case there isn’t much traffic on the 2.4GHz band, I’ld deactivate 5GHz (or use it exclusively).
On the other hand, I have to admit that I’m not an expert on this field and that I would prefer the use of ethernet cables most of the time, as it would require physical access to the network to compromise it.
Thanks for the input! That is already much more than what I know on this matter. I appreciate all input I can get in order to configuring my WiFi interface for better power efficiency. Thanks again!
I just installed powertop (2.15-2) on my laptop to see which network interface will consume less power. But even if I unplug the external power adapter, powertop won’t provide me the column called Power est. Now I’m a little bit…hmmpf
If it is the firs time you start powertop on battery, it has to be run for a certain amount of time to perform a number of measurement on the power consumption of your system before being able to make a power estimation and showing that info.
When you start it in the terminal, it will tell you how many measurement must be done.
Try tlp. It can toggle the power management of a wireless card when on battery or AC.
WIFI_PWR_ON_AC=off WIFI_PWR_ON_BAT=on
If you encounter issues, you can disable it. Intel provides different wifi power saving profiles for its Windows driver. I am not sure how it works in the iwlwifi driver. I have never tried it myself.
Thanks @chroot for suggesting tlp! I have little familiarity with it but I know it’s a quite extensive power management solution.
I have been using cpupower, which I don’t think is a power management tool (I may be wrong), to scale up and down cpu frequency on-the-fly to also achieve some degree of power saving.
Now I have switched to power-profiles-daemon. I am going to give it some time to see how well that may work.
But I am on the experimentation trail, so sure I will try tlp as well down the road.
My patience got me watching the powerconsumtion of wlan0.
If it’s just connected to my router, doin nothing but be happy, it needs 2.27mW. When watching a video on youtube, it immediately jumps to 4.06W and stays there untill either the video ends or the battery is down.
So I decided to not use any patience anymore. The only thing happening is getting uncomfortable.
