A look at terminal emulators, part 1 [LWN.net]

A look at terminal emulators, part 1

Posted Apr 2, 2018 19:47 UTC (Mon) by tytso (✭ supporter ✭, #9993)
Parent article: A look at terminal emulators, part 1

Could you also measure in part 2 the power consumption of a terminal emulator when it is idle? I noticed that there is surprising variances between different terminal emulators, based on whether you can do things like suppress blinking cursors, and how often they wake up the CPU for no good reason.

Thanks!

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power consumption: suggestions welcome

Posted Apr 3, 2018 14:19 UTC (Tue) by anarcat (subscriber, #66354) [Link] (1 responses)

power consumption is not currently measured in the test harness i have now. if you have suggestions on how that could be easily instrumented, i'm all ears. but consider that the first test bed was "time $dump_a_bunch_of_stuff", which ended up being rewritten as a small python program that uses getrusage() to get I/O, memory, wall/sys/user time metrics. as far as i know, getrusage doesn't provide "power consumption" (which would be a tricky metric to implement at best)...

so how do you measure power consumption of a given process anyways? assume i know about powertop and that it's not a good answer (because it's not a batch program).

i would have assumed that the sum of "I/O + memory + CPU usage" would be a good metric of power consumption...

power consumption: suggestions welcome

Posted Apr 3, 2018 16:44 UTC (Tue) by tytso (✭ supporter ✭, #9993) [Link]

What I would suggest is doing the test while the system is quiesced and then measure total power used by the whole system. Then use the terminal program with the lowest total system power and use it as the baseline.