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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised OS X didn't already using Timer Coalescing or lower process priority of unfocused applications. The Linux kernel has used Timer Coalescing for a long time. On Windows, there are utilities like Process Lasso that enables user-configurable process priority adjustments.

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That was my first thought too -- Windows has had timer coalescing since at least 2008, if not longer.

It landed (at least officially) in Windows 7. Quite awhile ago!

The whitepaper at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg4... indicates that Windows timer coalescing requires an application to explicitly opt in. The article describes OS X Mavericks' support as applying to all upcoming timers while on battery power (presumably excluding particular classes of timing-sensitive applications, such as audio playback), which would be a much more aggressive approach than in Windows.

Yea that's fair. I was actually thinking of timer coalescing on the server OS for improved power efficiency/performance -- I'm sure IIS, MSSQL, etc. all opt-in to coalescing responsibly.

It sounds like the OSX version is more of a "forced timer coalescing" feature.

Sure, but even with an extended battery, I'm not getting 9 hours on either windows 7 or linux on my lenovo laptop.

Well, nobody (i believe) said that with Mavericks you would. The new MBAir with crazy 12h batteries are running Mountain Lion. It's just because Haswell.

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