High battery usage

[Aeldit]

Hi, when I lock my laptop with no application running (except Hyprland, hypridle, hyprlock and some services necessary for the computer to work), the battery goes down by 8% in 30 minutes. I have changed my config to use the CPU instead of the GPU (screencopy_mode = 1), but it is still draining quite fast.

Is there anything I can do to limit/prevent that?

Also when I have nothing running I have 1.2GB of RAM that is used

Here is my config if it helps:

general {
    screencopy_mode = 1
}

background {
    monitor =
    path = $HOME/.config/hyde/themes/Decay Green/wallpapers/aurora_borealis.jpg
    reload_time = 0
}

input-field {
    monitor =
    size = 200, 50
    outline_thickness = 4
    outer_color = rgba(144, 206, 170, 0.73)
    inner_color = rgba(28, 30, 39, 0.73)
    font_color = rgb(144, 206, 170)
    fade_timeout = 1000 # Milliseconds before fade_on_empty is triggered.
    hide_input = false
    check_color = rgb(0, 0, 0);
    fail_color = rgb(255, 255, 255) # if authentication failed, changes outer_color and fail message color
    position = 0, -40
    capslock_color = rgba(255, 0, 0, 0.83);
}

label {
    monitor =
    # clock
    text = cmd[update:10000] echo "$TIME"
    color = rgb(149, 211, 175)
    font_size = 55
    font_family = Fira Semibold
    halign = center
    valign = center
    position = 0, 40
}

[code-IM-perfect]

As I understand, the battery usage is similar to when it is left unlocked for 30 min too, right?

I don't think hyprlock can do something to reduce that

[PointerDilemma]

So hyprlock has an event driven loop. So it should be idle at some point.
If you launch hyprlock with -v to show verbose logs, you should see a section similar to this at some point:

[TRACE] [core] got poll event
[TRACE] [core] got poll event
[TRACE] [DP-3] frame 25, Current fps: 62.50
[TRACE] timer thread firing
[TRACE] timer thread firing
[TRACE] timer thread firing
[TRACE] timer thread firing
[TRACE] timer thread firing
[TRACE] timer thread firing
[TRACE] timer thread firing
[TRACE] timer thread firing
[TRACE] timer thread firing
[TRACE] timer thread firing
[TRACE] timer thread firing
[TRACE] timer thread firing
[TRACE] [core] got poll event
[TRACE] [core] got poll event
[TRACE] [core] got poll event
[TRACE] [DP-3] frame 26, Current fps: 0.29
[TRACE] [core] got poll event

Here we rendered frame 25 and then nothing happens. Only timers fire. Notice the Current fps (which are not 100% accurate) show a number close to 0 because there was no new frame in quite a while.
If you can't find such a pattern it could be a hyprlock bug.

Hyprlock does have an inherent power usage of course that is mainly dictated by your graphics stack in case hyprlock properly idles. There is not much we can do to optimize that and it also shouldn't be that bad.
If you feel like it drains too much, lock the screen, switch tty and check which processes are running and consuming CPU/GPU or whatever. You seem to think GPU is always more power hungry, which is not a correct assumption a lot of the time. Also screencopy_mode is only relevant when launching hyprlock. Afterwards it is not used any more.

Regarding the memory usage: Your background image will be loaded in memory. We also need some more for other stuff. 1.2GB is ok if your background has a size close to that. On its own it shouldn't use more that a 10MB (on my desktop it uses 2MB with screenshot background)
Edit: on my machine it currently reports ~150Mb. I misinterpreted the ps output...

[Aeldit]

Hi thanks for your answer.
I have tried like you said to switch to tty and monitor memory and GPU usage, and you're right the GPU is almost not used. However, I noticed when comparing to swaylock (which I have been using since I posted this discussion) that hyprlock uses 244 MB of RAM, but swaylock only uses 20 MB. That is probably why my battery was draining quite fast.

The only difference I know about between swaylock and hyprlock is that the latter is GPU accelerated and displays the current time, which swaylock doesn't do. Appart from that, I'm not sure what could be the cause of this RAM usage

[PointerDilemma]

Can you do something like hyprlock --config assets/example.conf & sleep 3 && cat /proc/$(pidof hyprlock)/smaps > hyprlock_smap.txt and post hyprlock_smap.txt ??
This file has all the memory mappings of hyprlock and allows me to get an idea of where it's coming from. Also, how did you check ram usage?

[Aeldit]

Hi, I'll do that.

I checked using btop from the tty

[PointerDilemma]

Wait I am an idiot. I misinterpreted the ps aux output. I thought it was bytes and not kilo bytes. So yeah it uses ~150MB for me too which is higher than what I would expect for sure. Although it also doesn't surprise me that much. A lot of that memory is allocated by the graphics stack.

I will try to investigate a bit and check where it is coming from.

[code-IM-perfect]

Yeah I was personally surprised how it was taking so less memory with a full graphics implementation, when even much simpler apps take a hefty amount of memory nowadays.

[Aeldit]

Hi, I'm not sure but maybe the fact it is written in C++ vs C (for swaylock) has an impact too ?

Here is the file you requested:
hyprlock_smap.txt