power consumption: suggestions welcome

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...