(Feature request) Power consumption

[Helge Willum Thingvad]

Hi,

I'm trying to set up a light-weight but nice looking and feature-rich Ubuntu 8.04 environment.
With several applications open, including Firefox 3 (if I'm not looking at any resource-hungry sites with Flash or heavy JavaScript), my ThinkPad Z60m consumes around 19-24W depending on screen brightness, usage and wireless activity, giving me around 2-2½ hours on a full charge.

In this specific scenario, according to powertop, the system wakes up around 75 times a second when idling. Geany, being a really nice text editor, for some reason causes exactly 10 wakeups/sec per open window (tabs have no effect). This is considerable compared to the total amount.

Is there any specific reason for these wakeups, and would it be possible to reduce or completely prevent them?
In comparison, GEdit causes a constant 5 wakeups/sec, regardless of how many windows/tabs are open and even with spell checking enabled.

I prefer Geany over GEdit for programming because of a more efficient interface, albeit it lacks spell checking support.

[Helge Willum Thingvad (helgesdk)]

Extra note (sorry, no edit button):

In the described scenario with 75 CPU wakeups/sec I forgot to mention that I had two instances of Geany open, so it was causing around 25% of them.
Next target is HAL and acpi, hehe.

I know I'm an optimization freak :P

[Jérôme Guelfucci (jerome-guelfucci-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for your bug report. This is not a bug in geany itself but in Scintilla, used by Geany.

See http://groups.google.com/group/scintilla-interest/browse_thread/thread/a63a60a90de08a55/a522c131fda1d622?#a522c131fda1d622 for more details. If you want to make things move forward, you should file a bug on the scintilla bug tracker.

[Siegfried Gevatter (rainct)]

By the way, there's a plugin available for spell checking, which was uploaded to days ago to Karmic as "geany-plugin-spellcheck".