Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Want to make changes in the Rhythmbox

[Sean McNamara <smcnam gmail com>]

Hi,

Isn't this your responsibility, as part of your assignment, to
determine how to reduce power consumption? Shouldn't you be
researching it instead of asking us? Anyway, here's a few hints:

Just think about what hardware on the system is consuming power while
Rhythmbox is playing:

 - The hard disk or SSD consumes power to read the music data from
disk (or the network, in which case the hard disk is idle and the
network card is consuming power)
 - The CPU consumes power to load the music into RAM, decode it, and
process it if necessary with effects etc
 - The sound card consumes power when it is active, because it has to
run a DAC and drive a speaker or headphones
 - The GPU consumes power (on modern OSes where the GPU is used for
desktop rendering) to render the UI, especially during UI updates; if
the UI is unchanged, very little resource is consumed.

Now think about how you will measure power consumption before and
after your changes. You can try software like Powertop, which may work
if your OS is Linux-based, to check the number of wakeups per second
coming from rhythmbox. Or you can measure power consumption at the
wall outlet, but be careful you aren't running any (known or unknown)
background tasks that might be taking up power, like an automated
desktop search indexer.

Then you just start making changes targeting a specific subsystem
(GPU, CPU, sound card, or I/O), measure, and repeat until you've
"appreciably" reduced the power consumption (I don't know what your
threshold for that would be).

Keep in mind that removing features is definitely one "easy" way to
reduce power consumption, but probably not what your assignment is
asking, since true power use optimization doesn't sacrifice features
-- although you are free to implement them in a different way.

Also remember that a lot of the power consumption characteristics of a
modern Linux desktop depend *heavily* on the driver subsystem, so you
are in all likelihood not going to see any improvement from working on
Rhythmbox directly. Most of the real power savings comes from
components in the Linux kernel and the graphics stack.

HTH,

Sean






On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 11:42 PM, Devender <devender cse iitkgp ernet in> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I am doing summer internship at the University of Alberta, Canada. I want to
> change the change the source code of the rhythmbox such that the power uses
> can be minimized.
> But I do not have much ideas how to reduce the power consumption.
>
> Any help  would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks and Regards
>
> Devender
> 3rd Year Undergraduate Student
>
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