High Battery Consumption Inquiry - Rider on MacBook Air M4

Avatar
Patryk Soltysik
Created

Dear JetBrains Support Team,

I am writing to express my concern regarding the significant battery consumption I am experiencing when using JetBrains Rider on my MacBook Air M4.

While I appreciate the powerful features Rider offers, I've noticed a substantial impact on my laptop's battery life. During development sessions using Rider, my battery typically lasts only around 5 hours. In contrast, when performing similar development tasks using Visual Studio Code, I can comfortably achieve 15+ hours of battery life on the same machine.

This significant difference drastically reduces the portability benefits of my MacBook Air and makes it challenging to work for extended periods away from a power source.

Could you please provide some insight into why Rider might be consuming significantly more power compared to other editors like VS Code, especially on Apple Silicon hardware?

More importantly, I would greatly appreciate any specific recommendations, settings adjustments, or best practices you can suggest to help mitigate this high battery drain while using Rider on a MacBook Air M4. I understand that IDE features and plugins contribute to resource usage, but the current level seems excessive compared to alternatives.

Thank you for your time and assistance. I look forward to your guidance on optimizing Rider for better battery performance. This is the only thing that prevents me from switching to Rider.

Thank you.

Votes

1

Share

5 comments
Avatar
Anna Morozyuk
Created

Hello Patryk Soltysik ,

Thank you for contacting Rider Forum. 

Sorry to hear that you've run into performance problems. First, I suggest the latest version, as we add a significant number of fixes and performance improvements with each release.

If battery consumption is still high, we need the following information for troubleshooting

• does it happen with any project or with a specific one? What is the type of this project? 

• collect Rider logs via Help | Collect Logs and Diagnostic Data;

• Backend snapshot (sampling part);

• and Frontend snapshot;

it also would be nice if you could share the output of the top command, when working with Rider. 

Upload the logs, dumps, command output and snapshots to our server and share the ID along with the answer or create a YouTrack issue attaching the abovementioned details, so we could take a closer look. You may do it right from the IDE using Help > Report a Bug…

Thank you in advance and have a great day!

0
Avatar
Patryk Soltysik
Created

Thank you for your answer. I did not test other projects but the one I am working on is a large Unity game project. I noticed that the background tasks alone take up to 15% cpu even when not working in the editor window and nothing is getting indexed or updated, just idle IDE. It takes more cpu and battery when being minimised then actively used Unity Engine. This is unacceptable and I have already switched to vs code. I will check back after few releases to see if anything improved but honestly I doubt it as there are numerous topics all over Internet from years ago with this particular issue on macbooks and nothing seem to be fixed after so many years and iterations. 

0
Avatar
Anna Morozyuk
Created

Thank you for providing a description. 

As a first measure of reducing CPU usage, could you please try disabling the Solution-wide analysis? in Editor | Inspection Settings untick the Enable solution-wide analysis. Will that help a load and battery life? 

0
Avatar
epicjonathan24
Created

Hello, I noticed this issue was never resolved. I also use the macbook air M4 (16 gigs of ram) and notice similar battery drain issues. I have updated to the latest version and I work in small C# Unity projects and also have these issues. I've been using rider for 30 minutes and i've dropped from 80% to 72%. This happens with every project. 

0
Avatar
Monica
Created

Hello epicjonathan24 

I'm sorry you're experiencing issues with battery consumption. To help further, could you tell me whether you tried Anna Morozyuk's suggestion and what the result was?

In case this was not helpful, please:

  1. Has the battery drained just when using the IDE or also when the computer is resting?
  2. Take a backend snapshot (sampling part);
  3. Take a Frontend snapshot;
  4. Share the next commands' output (when the issue is happening):
    1. Open Terminal: The Terminal application is located in Applications > Utilities
    2. Type top -o cpu | tee /path/topCpu.txt and press Enter. Press cmd + q to quit
    3. Type pmset -g batt | tee /path/batteryStatus.txt and press Enter. Copy the output to a text file.
    4. Type top -o power | tee /path/powerProcesses.txt and press Enter
    5. Type system_profiler SPPowerDataType | grep ‘Cycle Count’ | tee /path/output.txt and press Enter
  5. At the same time, the top output is taken, please take three screenshots (with a difference of a second) of the Activity Monitor (GUI) → Energy tab.
  6. Collect the logs immediately after the previous steps are completed, when the issue is reproduced by going to Help | Collect Logs and Diagnostic Data

Then attach the zip file(s) to our secure upload site https://uploads.jetbrains.com/, and share the uploadID.

0

Please sign in to leave a comment.