tick_nohz_handler is consuming too much power

[netrusov]

I ran powertop and saw that tick_nohz_handler is consuming 3.5W of power while idling. it's not doing anything by itself, but it's a symptom that something is wrong and it won't let your CPU idle properly.

I'm sitting on wi-fi so it was obvious that something is wrong with it. when I disabled adapter via iwctl, power usage of this handler dropped to 1.3W
turned out that iwd was doing periodic scans of available networks, even when connection is already established. I've disabled periodic scans, re-enabled adapter, and restarted iwd service: power drain stays at 1.3W and sometimes drops below 1W, idling at 10W total (with alacritty, powertop, and firefox running).

here's how to disable it (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Iwd#Disable_periodic_scan_for_available_networks):

# /etc/iwd/main.conf
[Scan]
DisablePeriodicScan=true

now my 4 year old Dell XPS can live a little bit longer on a battery.

hope this helps, I'd be glad if someone could confirm that this works for them.

PS: if anyone is also interested in how to minimize power consumption, I've also completely disabled Nvidia dGPU because it's was useless for me even on Windows.

[Arekaldi]

Thank you for your reminding, I have the problem too. I'm on Ubuntu with KDE 25.10. It seems that the problem is universal on linux kernel On the one hand, it is because WIFI, and on the other hand, it is because my Logitech G PRO X 2 mouse. Actually, I have been puzzled by this problem for a long time. Thank you for your help.