Description:
Using Writer and gedit for the same amount of time wears battery power out faster in Writer's case. When people need to use LO for long stretches on DC, that can become a problem.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. With a laptop, note what you plug into it, including indirectly. Assume all of it might consume power. (I usually plug in nothing but power and a flash thumb stick.)
2. Set your laptop to display how much battery capacity is left. These steps assume you'll know the percentage remaining.
3. Check that the battery is fully charged.
4. Use the laptop on battery (DC) power only. Disconnect the AC.
5. Use LO Writer continuously for a while. How long depends on battery capacity.
6. When you've used a substantial portion of battery capacity, note what percentage of the charge remains.
7. Recharge, such as by plugging into the AC, until full. During recharging, you can use any software or none and you can connect anything or nothing, as you wish.
8. Exit LibreOffice.
9. Plug into the laptop only what was plugged in for step 1 and plug nothing else into it, even indirectly.
10. Disconnect the AC and use your laptop, with the same things plugged in as in step 1.
11. Use gedit (this likely works with other text editors, too). Use gedit a lot. Don't use other apps.
12. Use the laptop until it has cosumed exactly as much battery power as it did during step 5.
13. Compare the time for step 5 to the time for step 12.

Actual Results:
Elapsed time until the battery had run to a given percentage of capacity was 25-40% shorter when the time was used up with LO Writer rather than with gedit.

Expected Results:
The elapsed time should have been only slightly different, if different at all.


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: Yes


OpenGL enabled: Yes

Additional Info:
LibreOffice Writer also appears to consume laptop battery power faster than does Document Viewer, which I use for PDFs.

I don't know why there's any difference at all. I don't have a printer connected and I don't use my USB ports differently for LO. I think hard drives (where both apps are installed on my machine) spin continuously absent sleep or hibernation, so the HDD's behavior shouldn't matter, but perhaps read access is far more frequent for swapping code components in and out of memory, and gedit or Document Viewer, which have fewer settings, may not be swapping after an initial load. I do use Writer to generate a few PDFs (gedit doesn't do that) but making them doesn't take long.

I don't know if the effect is the same with other LibreOffice apps. I don't know how other word processors, text editors, PDF viewers, and other kinds of apps compare. I don't know if Writer performs differently on other platforms (mine is Fedora 30 Linux, kept evergreen). My laptop has 3.8 GiB of RAM; otherwise, I don't think the hardware platform should affect the savings for an app. I generally exit apps I don't need at the moment, including LO.

If the consumption is due to frequent swapping, perhaps LO should sense how much RAM is available and swap larger or more components at a time, reducing swap operations and reducing the need to read from the HDD.

When LibreOffice can outperform other word processors (assuming doing so gets promotion by the organization offering LO), it could gain market share, or the percentage of the installed base. Being able to work longer when not plugged into AC power is an advantage.

I am not prepared to test the latest version, meant for early adopters. This version is part of the distro I use, kept evergreen, and is still offered at the LO website.