Oolite Bulletins

I wondered of any of our technically minded people here could tell me the footprint of Oolite upon a netbook. By footpint I mean power and memory usage. I'm interested in how long I could play Oolite on my netbook on battery power.

Most netbooks go to a automatic power setting where many settings are stepped down to conserve power- including screen brightness. Full screen video playback, for example, is a huge power eater, and a computer in hibernation obviously a big power saver (but makes the computer not usable.) Oolite would be somewhere inbetween, but does it lean closer to video playback or to hibernation?

If you only play Oolite, how long would you expect to be able to play it on battery power, given that maximum battery usage (with maximum power saving) is X hours, and the amount of time playing oolite is a percentage of X? So, if your battery is listed at 4 hours, and you rate playing Oolite as 75%, then you could optimistically expect to play Oolite on battery power for 3 hours.

Also, what could you turn off to save power? Wifi is an obvious contender, but is there much more you can do?

Sydney2K wrote:

Most netbooks go to a automatic power setting where many settings are stepped down to conserve power- including screen brightness. Full screen video playback, for example, is a huge power eater, and a computer in hibernation obviously a big power saver (but makes the computer not usable.) Oolite would be somewhere inbetween, but does it lean closer to video playback or to hibernation?

Closer to playing full-screen video. Quite possibly worse.

Sydney2K wrote:

Oolite would be somewhere inbetween, but does it lean closer to video playback or to hibernation?

I will repeat my earlier finding that oolite is the single most CPU-intensive app I run. When playing a fullscreen (1600x1050) video, mplayer uses around 6% CPU according to all data I can gather. Oolite, on the other hand, runs about 60%, with occasional spikes higher.

I've recently verified that this is true of trunk as well as 1.73.4. But hey, it's a complex app with a lot to do, so I don't really find these data surprising. If it were a runaway idle loop or something like that, it wouldn't stop at 60.

I don't know from netbooks, but I would assume that oolite would drain batteries like a house afire. For your sake, I hope I'm wrong!

Ram usage can be brutal in v1.73.4 -- I've seen it eating >800 MB, so no power savings there either.

Switeck wrote:

Ram usage can be brutal in v1.73.4

Try the latest nightly.

Ahruman wrote:

Switeck wrote:

Ram usage can be brutal in v1.73.4

Try the latest nightly.

I have to second this. After putting more time in with the nightlies, I've discovered that CPU usage, at least, varies a lot more now than it did with 1.73.4. Instead of staying at 60% or above pretty much all the time, now it drops as low as 15% when I'm inside a station, for example. Yeah, put a Superhub, a Nuit station, and a buoy factory all in the viewport at once, then it ramps back up.

Point is, things are improving on the resource-usage front.

I've used the nightly builds already.
It's because of that that I explicitly mentioned v1.73.4 instead of Oolite in general.

Games in general can be very resource intensive. There's a lot of data being shuffled around...
So it's no surprise to me that Oolite can demand more power than a media player app. Still, Oolite demands a lot less than any other accelerated 3D game I have installed.

Just my .2cr worth.