Windows 10 will suppress background applications

Task Manager shows which processes are in “background moderated” mode to save battery power. Source: Microsoft

In January 2017, with the build of Insider Preview 15002, Microsoft began an experiment with partial suppression of the activity of background applications. According to the results of the experiment on a limited number of devices, it turned out that the Power Throttling function can save up to 11% of the battery charge in the most extreme cases. Therefore, it is now decided to make this feature part of build 16176 in the Insider Preview. This build was released a few days ago, it became the first update after the release of Creators Update.

In Power Throttling mode, background processes run in the most energy-saving mode. The process goes, but with minimal energy. Microsoft says that since January it has made improvements in Power Throttling, listening to the wishes of users, so this feature should help save energy on many computers.

For the operation of the Power Throttling function, the hardware capabilities of modern processors are used, namely, the Speed ​​Shift technology. While the feature is supported only on Intel Core processors of the 6th generation and later. This is Skylake and Kaby Lake. Microsoft is now working to expand support for other processors, it can happen in the next few months.
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In practice, energy saving in background processes requires the implementation of a “complex detection system” at the operating system level, Microsoft explains in the official blog. Windows needs to determine which background applications are important to the user, and which ones are not important. For example, important background applications include playing music, as well as some other important tasks. For most applications, smart detection works well, but on some applications it can be buggy. Microsoft is calling to report situations where Power Throttling did not work correctly. To do this, run the Feedback Hub feedback tool and report the problem in the category Power and Battery → Throttled Applications.

In addition, you can independently control the aggressiveness of suppressing background applications through the slider.



There, this mode can be made more aggressive compared to the recommended value (Battery Saver) or disabled at all (Best Performance).

In the end, it is possible to exclude specific applications from the “background moderation” mode. This is done through the properties of the battery (Settings → System → Battery). In the “Battery Usage by App” window, the required application is selected and the “Managed by Windows” setting is switched to the “Off” mode.

When the laptop is powered from the network, the Power Throttling function is not activated. In this regard, Microsoft recommends running benchmarks, for example, only in the network mode to obtain an objective result of performance measurements.

Microsoft developers promise to make changes to the API, so that individual applications have direct access to power saving settings when running in the background.


This is how the task manager in Insider Preview looked (build 15002)

Note In the final function of Power Throttling, a change has been made to the task manager: for background applications, the term “Moderated in the background” (Background Moderated) is now used instead of the term “Throttled”.

Interestingly, the Power Throttling feature in Windows 10 is a bit like the battery saving feature in modern browsers. There, this is also done by “muffling” the work of the background tabs - scripts, flash, etc. For example, the Chrome browser from the penultimate version of Chrome 57 actively suppresses the work of the background tabs . There it is done purely at the program level. Each WebView component has a budget (in seconds) for running timers in the background. The timer can not start if the budget is negative. After the timer is completed, its running time is subtracted from the budget. The budget is automatically replenished with time (at 0.01 from the budget with every second of real time).


Suppressing background tab activity in Chrome 57

The main reason for implementing this feature is that some poorly designed applications (for example, analytics scripts and javascript ads) consume a lot of CPU resources, although they are in the background. This negatively affects the performance of the browser and consumes battery power on mobile devices.

At the program level, the function of suppressing App Nap applications in macOS also works. In macOS, this way you can even increase the performance of the active application.