My laptop battery has been showing some noticeable signs of wear recently, so I’ve just setup TLP to try to get every bit of juice I can out of it.

Not long after I enabled TLP I felt like I could notice my battery usage decreasing. That’s either placebo or my battery really is just that bad, and I’m not sure which it is.

I also noticed my shell was taking significantly longer to startup, like close to a second. Anybody who makes even moderate use of the command line knows how annoying that can quickly get.

After some fiddling, I narrowed the culprit down to the following default TLP setting.

CPU_ENERGY_PERF_POLICY_ON_BAT=balance_power

Dialing this setting up one notch to “default” fixed my long shell launch times. I put this line in a new config file inside /etc/tlp.d.

CPU_ENERGY_PERF_POLICY_ON_BAT=default

I don’t know what effect this will have on battery life, but I’m sure the tradeoff is worth it.