Why is java killing my battery life? rMBP

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

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

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 said:

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!

Click to expand...

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.

Crashplan misbehaving

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.

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.

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.

My word. Java sucks.