Windows Timer Resolution: Megawatts Wasted

In the meantime, Linux has (by default) an adaptable timer and will soon be fully tickless [1]. In other words there will be no fixed timer and the OS will calculate when the next wake-up should be scheduled and sleep until that time (or until an interrupt comes).<p>At the same time, PowerTOP [2] will nicely show you which programs or drivers are responsible for waking up the computer and estimate how much power each program is consuming.<p>[1] <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/549580/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;549580&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="https://01.org/powertop/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;01.org&#x2F;powertop&#x2F;</a>

This is an interesting post. jQuery was fixed to use 13ms as the minimum animation interval a some time ago. This seems like a legit Crome bug to file as the interval should be more deterministic. Chrome shouldn&#x27;t take a 1ms tick unless it really needs it.<p>I wonder how much javascript code uses setTimeout(x,0) to push code to the end of the run loop.

Interesting. I had clockres on my machine but never bothered to learn what it does. I&#x27;ve used that in code that I wanted a better timer but ended up using QueryPerformanceCounter&#x2F;Frequency and rolling my own timer class but that can be a bigger pain than just using the timer.<p>On my machine, I got similar settings and found chrome being the sole offender which is probably the worst offender in many ways. Firefox and IE were clean so Google is the outlier and given I always have Chrome browser open somewhere while SQL or devenv is not always open, I suppose that&#x27;s suboptimal wonder if they will change it.

Macs have a similar issue. Unexpected programs activate the dedicated GPU. Skype and twitter used to do this. Power users run special utilities to force the dedicated GPU off, but the normal user has no idea that his Mac battery won&#x27;t last.<p>In my PC the programs raising the resolution are gtalk, chrome and skype. I run visual studio and sql server but they don&#x27;t show up in powercfg.<p>quartz.dll is from DirectShow. A multimedia component is expected to requiere more resolution. The fault is in the program calling into DirectShow.

<i>&quot;Another common culprit on my machine is sqlservr.exe. I think this was installed by Visual Studio but I’m not sure. I’m not sure if it is being used or not.&quot;</i><p>Is this attitude still prevalent in the windows community? I thought things had improved on that front.<p>Its worth pointing out that &quot;the highest frequency wins&quot; is not an example of &quot;tragedy of the commons.&quot;

Like the author says, Megawatt is a measurement of energy wasted per second.<p>If we take his claim that 10 MW is being wasted, then the energy wasted at 10 MJs⁻¹ over a year is the energy of 5 small atomic bombs.<p><a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10MW+times+a+year" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolframalpha.com&#x2F;input&#x2F;?i=10MW+times+a+year</a>

Author provides source code using non-monospace (!) slanted (!!!) font. I would have wasted a damn gigawatt to unsee that.