Show apps consuming significant energy

[Danielle Foré]

We should come up with some nice way to show which apps may be consuming a significant amount of energy.

[Marcus Wichelmann (l-admin-3)]

For that we need to listen to the list of running apps per time, because I don't think that there is already a service that does the job. We should also think about the privacy aspect because such a feature would log the time of use for any application. Maybe it should be possilbe to disable that feature in the security-privacy-plug.

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

Hm, I'm not sure we need to be listening to the length of use for an app, only how much it is using right now. I think what we want is to be listening for which apps are performing the most processor and io wake ups right?

[Marcus Wichelmann (l-admin-3)]

Yes, I think so. So we need to write a basic process manager that gets every 10 seconds the current used ressources for any process (with a desktop-file..?) and adds these values to a database. Should that service save these information only until the session ends or do we want to save that database somewhere..?

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

I don't think we need a database either or to be constantly checking. We only need to see what is using power when someone opens the indicator. It looks like GNOME power statistics just checks upower over dbus. Then we'd only need to match processes to .desktops (I imagine using Bamf?)

[Marcus Wichelmann (l-admin-3)]

So you do not want to display which apps have used how much energy since the last battery load but you want to show which apps are using the most energy in the moment? That's a bit easier. Then we do only need a way to get a list of the current running processes and their used ressources.

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

Yes exactly. The idea is to be able to take action on apps that are consuming lots of power right now.

[Marcus Wichelmann (l-admin-3)]

Ah, okay. I thought you mean something like that feature in the newest ios.

Any ideas how to get a list of the current running applications?

[Djax (parnold-x)]

I hacked a little bit on a system monitor some time ago. Take a look at the branch or ping me...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/28321853/system-monitor.webm
https://code.launchpad.net/~parnold-x/+junk/system-monitor

[Marcus Wichelmann (l-admin-3)]

Yeah, nice, that will be a great help, because I had no idea how to get the process list. And if the user enables the power-saving-mode we kill all the apps consuming the most energy... :P

[Marvin Beckers (embik)]

Honestly, I'm no big fan of showing these in the indicator. With a lot of different apps running, this seems to be kind of a overkill, doesn't it? IMHO such information would belong into the power plug.

[Marcus Wichelmann (l-admin-3)]

Maybe I should also say, that it shows max. the top five.
I don't think it makes any sense to move that into the plug, because this feature shows you how to spend some energy and this should be easily abailable (at least in battery mode). A possible history fearure for the plug is a completely different feature with anpther functionality.