Why is java killing my battery life? rMBP

[rex3]

I've been plagued by very short battery life on my rMBP, and I've traced it down to java. Java is always using 100-120% of my CPU in Activity Monitor. It's a root process, not affected by switching users. I don't have any idea what to do about this. It continues even if I disable java in Safari.

Thanks!

[ChristianJapan]

Can you share a screenshot from system monitor ? What software you have installed ? Something known running in Java and have some"little helper" installed?

[rex3]

I'm not running anything that I know of that would explain this. Here's the screenshot, though.

[locoboi187]

Java tends to use the dedicated GPU, so more power drain.

[Stvwndr219]

what happens if you kill the java process?

my guess is that you have some software that has a dependency on java that is triggering java there is a runaway java process that is not on the activity monitor screened shown.

i.e. there is some java functionality in openoffice and other open source programs - so you might want to start there and see if there are any other possibilities.

Worse comes to worse, try backing up and restoring - though it might just restore the same behavior. check your startup as well if this is happening right after boot - it could be a background process while starting up.

[rex3]

Thanks, everyone. I killed the process and restarted, and I can't recreate the situation. This seems strange to me because I restarted several times without killing the process and it kept coming back. In other words, I have no idea what caused it, but all's well now. Back up to 6 hours!

[Krevnik]

Originally Posted by rex3

Thanks, everyone. I killed the process and restarted, and I can't recreate the situation. This seems strange to me because I restarted several times without killing the process and it kept coming back. In other words, I have no idea what caused it, but all's well now. Back up to 6 hours!

It's possible CrashPlan was part of the problem. It us fundamentally a Java app. When switching to a new machine, depending on how you migrated things, it could have exposed a bug in CrashPlan that ate CPU.

I had to tweak things a bit myself when migrating because of CrashPlan.

[rex3]

I just noticed my battery life plummeting again, and this time the culprit was the CrashPlan menu bar, which was using up 100% of the CPU. It makes me wonder if CrashPlan hasn't been the culprit the whole time. I did migrate from a Time Machine backup when I got my new rMBP. Can you tell me what you did to tweak things so CrashPlan behaved?

Thanks!

[BruceJ1]

After suffering with chronic battery life problems for several months, I removed Crashplan from my system. My Java CPU runaway/battery life problems are gone! My macbook runs much cooler, and I havn't had any problems since. Battery life has jumped from 3 hours to 6+ hours.

[CarreraGuy]

CrashPlan?!? what a name.

And careful if you are a developer who uses the Eclipse IDE - it's also Java based and your free memory will be eclipsed by used memory.

[fins831]

Same with netbeans. All java based. I use parallels and visual studios even though I detest Microsoft. I just prefer it since I get every version for free.