Applications Power Management FAQ

Are there any side-effects of grouping timers?

Grouping timers works fine on a system level. However, you do not want to group timers on systems across networks. You really do not want all the requests to come to a network server at the same time and hog the server.

How can I detect whether any application is doing polling when it is supposed to be idle?

Powertop is the utility that points to the application using periodic timers. 'strace' utility can also be used to see whether the application is really idle when it is supposed to be idle.