Powertop.

Over the last few days I have been looking at ways of cutting down on my power consumption. I have been looking around at different ways of doing that and one interesting tool I found is powertop.  As the name suggests it's a tool that gives 'Table Of Power' consumption. I think in the old days top used to stand for Table Of Processes. Powertop is a pretty cool tool and with one look at it I know why my fileserver never goes to sleep: mythbackend. On my desktop, the biggest culprits are artsd and ata_piix (whatever that is). Asterisk was also on the list but I disabled it. Powertop also suggested that I make the following change:

echo 1500 >  /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs

It will apparently result in the swap being written to less often.