Unjustifiable battery usage

[ebeloded]

Caret is using an insane amount of battery power. Here is a screenshot of battery usage by app on my Windows 10 PC:

Please note that I launch Caret couple times a day and use it sparingly, unlike Chrome, which is always on with multiple windows and dozens of tabs open.

Additionally, I want to point out that the problem is not with Electron: Visual Studio Code and Slack are also Electron-based apps and they are active all the time in my environment. VS Code is under heavy pressure all the time.

It makes no sense why a text editor (yes, simple and beautiful) is using so much power. I think it is very important for a text editor to be very gentle with the battery. People would want to use this kind of app on their laptops off the grid for long periods of time.

Wish you luck with finding the problem! I would also really appreciate if you could share your findings.

[erusev]

It makes no sense why a text editor (yes, simple and beautiful) is using so much power. I think it is very important for a text editor to be very gentle with the battery. People would want to use this kind of app on their laptops off the grid for long periods of time.

I absolutely agree - we'll investigate.

Thanks.

[ebeloded]

My blind guess is that hardware acceleration is forced with CSS on everything. CSS Hardware acceleration is known for increasing the memory usage, as well as draining the battery.

This one would be easy to disconfirm.

[erusev]

Sure, we'll check that, it could also have something to do with automatic updates.

[astoilkov]

Hi @ebeloded,

We investigated the problem and we found out that Caret is doing background work while the app is not focused. We eliminated that and now the app should drain battery only if it is being used. This means that if you are using it rarely you shouldn't see Caret in your statistics.

This changes are available in the latest Caret 1.9.1 release. Could you try them out and see if you will see a difference?

Thanks in advance.

[ebeloded]

Great news, thanks! Will get back to you in a week after stats has been gathered.

[astoilkov]

@ebeloded Did you had chance to look at the new battery usage of Caret for the past week?

[ebeloded]

Caret still holds second position in my battery usage for last week:

I kept the app always up to date and didn't change the way I use it.

[astoilkov]

Thanks for the information. Can you answer a few quick questions so we could know how to approach this.

• How much time do you spend using the app compared to other apps?
• Do you close the app while not using it or do you leave it sit in the background?
• Do you have File -> Autosave functionality turned on?
• Does you PC have a traditional spinning HDD or SSD?
• Is Split(Live) Preview always open when using Caret?

[astoilkov]

@ebeloded Any news or changes with the experienced problem?

[ebeloded]

I'm sorry - this issue and your comment with questions slipped my radar.

Also, I was getting very unpredictable results from windows battery usage stats. It made me think that the stats may not be very reliable, thus the issue may not be with Caret at all.

I will give the battery testing another run today while using the app a lot. I'll get back to you at the end of the day and share my results.

[ebeloded]

Hey. I've been keeping an eye on the battery usage within varying time periods and it looks that the problem persists. Caret is reliably among top 5 apps to drain the battery. The stats also looked pretty coherent with the actual usage of apps.

I'll give you answers to your questions with my own observations:

1. My estimate of the time I spend in Caret is about 20 minutes of approximately 8 hour workday. That would be an average. Some days I could spend 10 minutes writing, other days up to an hour. I always have only one instance of the app open at a time.
2. Most of the time I leave the app running in the background;
3. Autosave is on;
4. I have a relatively new machine with an SSD drive;
5. I never use Split view;

Hope that helps.