- Timo Sirainen dovecot@dovecot.org:
On Tue, 2009-10-13 at 21:38 +0100, Ed W wrote:
Something I had been pondering recently (I started using a cell phone with imap idle support), was a previous poster mentioning the huge increase in battery life from turning off the radio for as long as possible. It appears that just turning on the radio (wifi or 3G) consumes much more energy than the transmitting of a few bytes of data after it's on. In particular synchronising certain types of infrequent transmissions may have a dramatic increase in battery life for mobile devices - I'm thinking mainly of the NOOPs when the connection is idling
Idling consumes lots of battery on mobiles, because it requires an active TCP session. Cell phone providers use a trick to circumvent that. They send a SMS (with a service signature that hides it from regular SMS readers) containing a trigger signal which causes the mobile to check for new mail.
This uses less battery. You may want to check if you application/mobile supports this.
p@rick
Is this something that could be implemented with the current architecture? Are there other types of application where synchronising "stuff" happening to multiple connections from the same client could be helpful?
No matter how many times I read the above, I've no idea what you're trying to ask. :) This seems like entirely a client-dependent issue and Dovecot can't much alter clients' behavior. Unless you're talking about running Dovecot on a cell phone?..