Since upgrading to Lion I noticed a severe degradation of my battery life (down to about 1:45) of my unibody MacBook Pro. The fan was running non-stop even with no apps running other than the ones that load on startup.
Did a little sleuthing and found that the process SystemUIServer – which handles apps in the menu bar as well as the Dashboard -- was gobbling up 25% of the CPU. Even killing all the running apps didn't change the CPU usage, so finally I killed/restarted the process itself. Now, with all the apps running it's down to 0.0% CPU, the fan is quiet, and the battery life has shot up to 3:55, which is about where it was before upgrading to Lion.
I've heard reports of SystemUIServer having memory leaks, but why would the CPU usage spike in such a way and then stay high? Of course, the issue is easily rectified by rebooting, but I rarely reboot unless a system update asks me to. Has anyone experienced this or found a fix?
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Is the SystemUIServer process using causing battery life issues in Lion?
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mike's pick
Before I got my MacBook Air, I did notice some problems on my old 13-inch Unibody MBP. It seemed like the battery life was just not up to par compared to how it was during Snow Leopard. I attributed this to some of the new functions of Lion, but it seemed too drastic to make sense.
I did a quick "top" in Terminal and saw that SystemUIServer was being a total resource hog. I tried killall SystemUiServer, but it only worked for a little while and I wanted a more permanent solution. So I did a little Googling and found this: hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2010091816362... - it shows you how to build a script that kills the SystemUIServer once a day "automagically" at a time when you probably aren't using the computer.
It worked for me on my MBP, but a couple of days later I got my MBA and sold my MBP and I haven't noticed these issues on the Air at all.
Good luck!
I did a quick "top" in Terminal and saw that SystemUIServer was being a total resource hog. I tried killall SystemUiServer, but it only worked for a little while and I wanted a more permanent solution. So I did a little Googling and found this: hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2010091816362... - it shows you how to build a script that kills the SystemUIServer once a day "automagically" at a time when you probably aren't using the computer.
It worked for me on my MBP, but a couple of days later I got my MBA and sold my MBP and I haven't noticed these issues on the Air at all.
Good luck!
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mike's pick
no idea if this will help you, but I have parallels installed on my macbook pro (it's still running snow leopard) and as of P's latest update there is a bug that keeps your processor running at just under 100% (even when Ps is not running, simply by having it in the dock!) and my fan was going full tilt all the time and the box was running at 180 degrees (which is Buster Pointdexter 'hot'). Obviously the battery life went down from an average of just under 6 hours to just over 1.
Anyway... if that is your problem, the solution is here:
reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20074173-263/dock-us...
If that isn't the problem, the easiest way to find out what your processor is up to is to open up terminal and type "top -o cpu" (without the quotes) and hit enter.
This will open up a program called "top" which shows you what your machine is doing on a second by second basis and the cpu switch will make it so that it sorts the results based on what's using the most processing power. Don't worry if this looks hard to parse, just look at the third column (cpu). The name of the process is in the second column. If when you think your computer is basically idle (no big programs running) you see something eating up more than 20% of your CPU, that's the culprit to your battery woes. Google whatever that process is and find out which program is running it and if you need to fix/delete something.
Anyway... if that is your problem, the solution is here:
reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20074173-263/dock-us...
If that isn't the problem, the easiest way to find out what your processor is up to is to open up terminal and type "top -o cpu" (without the quotes) and hit enter.
This will open up a program called "top" which shows you what your machine is doing on a second by second basis and the cpu switch will make it so that it sorts the results based on what's using the most processing power. Don't worry if this looks hard to parse, just look at the third column (cpu). The name of the process is in the second column. If when you think your computer is basically idle (no big programs running) you see something eating up more than 20% of your CPU, that's the culprit to your battery woes. Google whatever that process is and find out which program is running it and if you need to fix/delete something.
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My daughter's brand new MB Air seems to have the same problem — it's supposed to get something like 7 hours on a battery and she thinks it might get 1/2 that or less.
I'll have to dig around and see see if she's having the same problem...
I'll have to dig around and see see if she's having the same problem...
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top is a great option as well as the slightly more colorful htop if you already have macPorts installed.
I just wanted to add that for people who are not into the command-line there is also the GUI app "Activity Monitor" in the utilities folder. Since it has graphing over time it may be easier to isolate spikes in processor usage.
I just wanted to add that for people who are not into the command-line there is also the GUI app "Activity Monitor" in the utilities folder. Since it has graphing over time it may be easier to isolate spikes in processor usage.
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