Dragonfish upgrade increased power usage by about 10W

As per the title, upgrading my machine seems to have bumped the power usage by about 10 to 15W overall, everything else staying the same.

I haven’t done any profiling yet as I would like to see if anyone else is experiencing the same thing, if I’m not the only one it may be worth doing some investigation.

So, how’s you power usage post upgrade?

Probably need to disable lru_gen

4 Likes

Had same increased cpu usage, this was the fix for me. Can recommend. I want to say that I may have had to use it as a post init command & reboot as I didn’t notice immediate results otherwise, but I could be remembering incorrectly.

1 Like

Thanks for the suggestions and sharing your experience, I’ll do that right now and monitor for a bit, should be obvious right away I guess.

Edit: the decreased in CPU usage is very obvious, it’s back at idling around 2-4% like it used to on Cobia. I’ll keep an eye on the power consumption graph for a bit.

After setting the lru_gen value to zero I got back 5W, with about 5W still missing so it appears there’s still some investigation to be done.

It’s been about a week since I implemented the changes for swap usage and lru gen - interesting my cpu usages has gone back up again. There is nothing particularly obvious that stands out to me in TOP other than the standard top CPU users which for me have always been middlewared, asyncio_loop, & python3. They seem to be consistently trading places with each other for top spot.

I’ll see if a saved config & clean install of the next update fixes this, but for now it is either temporarily resolved with a reboot once every ~7 days or fairly tolerable without.

But with a 5900x I’ve done from generally MAX 2% cpu usage on idle to 6-9% on idle, which is a fairly big jump. This is with everything else being the same except for Dragonfish being the current version. Stopping all apps does nothing at all to reduce this new idle average usage.

tldr; I think I agree with you that there is something more to investigation here, but I’m not certain if it is worth a new bug ticket or to just wait for new version update.

I haven’t done anything yet as I’m super busy with work and life but I did notice some python3 children processes of middlewared getting pretty busy after a few days. A middlewared restart brings them in line though.

I can’t say this causes the extra CPU usage though as I do not captured a baseline yet.

What I noticed when I upgraded to 24.04.1 today is also another thing: cpu power management seems to have changed.

I used to have three cpu governors available:
Performance
Schedutil
Ondemand

Up until now I was using ondemand, which kept my system at 65W at idle, now that’s gone I have to use schedutil which, in combination with the other things increased power consumption by exactly 10W as described…

I did play around with the available governors but I can’t see a difference in power consumption in addition to the one I got from disabling lru_gen.

Even setting the governor to “powersave” still doesn’t do much if anything at all.