1699746 - Evaluate throttling the amount of power available to background processes

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Content Processes, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

Windows scheduler can be instructed to throttle the amount of power being used by a given process. According to Microsoft documentation:

ProcessPowerThrottling enables throttling policies on a process, which can be used to balance out performance and power efficiency in cases where optimal performance is not required. When a proces opts in to throttling, the system will try to increase power efficiency through strategies such as capping CPU frequency or using more power efficient cores. Power throttling is typically used when the process is not contributing to the user experience, which provides longer battery life without obvious compromises to an application's performance. If an application doesn't explicitly handle power throttling, the system will use its own heuristics to automatically manage power throttling.

We should evaluate using this for background processes.

Implementation would require changing hal_impl::SetProcessPriority() to call SetProcessInformation() with an appropriately filled PROCESS_POWER_THROTTLING_STATE structure.

Comment 1

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

Also CC'ing Bob and Toshihito who know Windows stuff better than I do.