Does anyone know if the number of open DEVONthink databases affects battery drain? I’ll cross post this in the DT forum but I thought I ask here as well.
Bring up your Activity Monitor app and check DEVONthink processes under the Energy tab to monitor what DT uses compared to your other apps.
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Thank for the response. What I’m actually wondering is not so much the impact of DT per se on battery drain but the impact of having several databases open at the same time rather than just one. I’m assuming that any impact would be negligible but given the expertise in this forum I thought I’d ask.
Response from DT Forum:
As long as the databases are basically idle in the background (e.g. no scheduled smart rules, no reminders, no RSS feeds), the only impact would be caused by automatic/scheduled synchronizing but this would be a minor impact without changes.
However, if you’re computer should run out of real memory due to the additional databases, then the system’s virtual memory will have a noticeable impact.
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Why do you not just give it a try, observe it the way @karlnyhus has suggested, and share your experience here with all of us?! 
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My experience is similar to what their forum said. I’ve noticed a little more energy usage when doing scope:all searches when my largest databases are open. Opening and closing databases spikes energy use significantly, too, but just once so shouldn’t eat up noticeable battery time.
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Yep. When we ask the computer to do something energy consumed. No different than our brains.
Sadly, our brains are still in the Intel era of idle wattage. We might as well think a lot because we’re going to burn roughly the same energy either way.
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A human Brain is consuming between 10-20 Watts/h (depending on the source) while a computer normally takes 10 (and more) times more for its operation.
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The number of open databases is not what matters. What matters is what you are doing with those databases. If the databases are open but no processing is occurring – no smart rules, searches, edits, etc., then the battery and other resources usage is low.
I have four databases I run all day long. There is 14 GB of data and 29 million “words” stored in these. When idle, the battery consumption is 0.4% according to Activity Monitor. When I’m doing searches or browsing documents or editing something, the consumption spikes to 2% briefly.
DEVONthink is very efficient when it stores data, creating indices and pointers at import time so that it can quickly locate and display your data later.
Katie
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Adding to the “database” of measurements to test a hypothesis, always an important thing to do but try to avoid being “fooled my statistics”, I opened all my databases (15!) and per Activity Monitor 0.3%, sometimes 0.4% when doing background synch. Of course, much more energy used when I exercise the app to do some work with it. Normally I run with 5-6 databases open all the time.
Yes, it is more than zero energy consumption, but hardly worth a concern. Quit any apps using energy if using energy is a problem.
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