NAME

       powerstat - a tool to measure laptop power consumption.

SYNOPSIS

       powerstat [-b] [-d secs] [-h] [-i idle] [-p] [-r] [-s] [-z] [delay [count]]

DESCRIPTION

       powerstat  is  a  program  that  measures  the power consumption of a mobile PC that has a
       battery power souce.   The  output  is  like  vmstat  but  also  shows  power  consumption
       statistics.  At the end of a run, powerstat will calculate the average, standard deviation
       and min/max of the gathered data.

       Note that running powerstat as root will provide extra information  about  processes  that
       have fork'd, exec'd and exited.

OPTIONS

       powerstat options are as follow:

       -b     redo  a  sample measurement if a system is busy, the default for busy is considered
              less than 98% CPU idle. The CPU idle threshold can be altered using the -i option.

       -d     specify delay before starting, default is 15 seconds. This gives the  machine  time
              to settle down and to dim the laptop display when in idle mode.

       -h     show help.

       -i     specify  the idle threshold (in % CPU idle) to force a re-sample measurement if the
              CPU is less idle than this level. This option implicitly enables the -b option.

       -p     redo a sample measurement if any processes fork(), exec() or exit().

       -r     redo if system is not idle and any processes fork(), exec() or exit(), an alias for
              -p -b

       -s     this dumps a log of the process fork(), exec() and exit() activity on completion.

       -S     use standard averaging to calculate power consumption instead of using a 120 second
              rolling average of capacity samples. This is only useful  if  the  battery  reports
              just  capacity  values  and  is  an  alternative  method  of  calculating the power
              consumption based on the start and current battery capacity.

       -z     forcibly ignore zero power rate readings from the battery, don't  use  this  unless
              you know what you are doing.

EXAMPLES

       Measure power with the default of 10 samples with an interval of 10 seconds
               powerstat

       Measure power with 60 samples with an interval of 1 second
               powerstat 1 60

       Measure  power  and  redo  sampling if we are not idle and we detect  fork()/exec()/exit()
       activity
               sudo powerstat -r

       Measure power and redo sampling if less that 95% idle
               powerstat -i 95

       Wait  to  settle  for  1  minute  then  measure  power  every  20  seconds  and  show  any
       fork()/exec()/exit() activity at end of the measuring
               powerstat -d 60 -s 20

SEE ALSO

       vmstat(8), powertop(8)

AUTHOR

       powerstat was written by Colin King <colin.king@canonical.com>

       This  manual  page  was  written  by Colin King <colin.king@canonical.com>, for the Ubuntu
       project (but may be used by others).

                                         23 January, 2014                            POWERSTAT(8)