haruki zaemonInvasion of the Battery-Life Snatchers
By Simon HarrisOver the past 6-9 months, I’ve been doing a lot of development using my PowerBook running on battery. For the most part it works really well: The performance is just fine (with some tweaking of the power-saving settings), giving me around 2 hours of editing, browsing, emailing, etc. That is unless I’m developing code using IntelliJ.
When running in the foreground, IntelliJ seems to use anywhere between 3.0% and 6.0% of the CPU. Not too bad you might think but that is when I’m not doing anything with it. Even when IntelliJ is in the background – either hidden or minimized – it still uses around 3.0% of the CPU as this screen-shot from top clearly shows:
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE1259 top 14.5% 0:29.70 1 18 22 776K 372K 2.62M 26.9M -- > 670 idea 2.7% 11:11.22 26 >>> 485 270M 28.3M 231M 831M < -- 1248 Safari 0.2% 0:06.22 6 127 238 8.89M 27.9M 18.8M 243M1247 SyncServer 0.0% 0:03.65 2 53 48 12.2M 3.36M 15.1M 47.3M1225 mdimport 0.0% 0:01.11 4 66 67 1.39M 3.27M 5.16M 39.7M668 bash 0.0% 0:00.02 1 14 17 220K 820K 904K 27.1M
A quick check of the Java version indicates that I am running JDK 1.5 by default:
simon$ java -versionjava version "1.5.0_02"Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_02-56)Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_02-36, mixed mode, sharing)
And a quick check of the About Box in IntelliJ confirms this.
Now admittedly I haven’t tried any other Java applications so I’m not too sure if it’s a Java issue, a Java on OS X issue, an IntelliJ issue or what but it is driving me nuts because it pretty much turns my 2+ hours of battery life into 30-45 minutes.
So if anyone has any idea how I might get IntelliJ to stop using CPU when it’s idle, please, please, please let me know.
Oh and Jeaves, “use Eclipse” and “get a real computer” will not be considered helpful answers ;-)
Update (30 August 2005)