Sleep when idle

sleep-when-idle is a daemon to initiate a transition to a sleep state when the system is idle.

Purpose

It can be used on a headless server, or on a desktop (in that case, you should disable the transition to sleep in your desktop environment).

The sleep-when-idle daemon gives you more flexibility on WHEN the system is considered idle.

Desktop environments perform a transition to sleep when there is no input from the user. But the machine can have on-going tasks that shall maintain the machine alive until completion:

• long download from Internet or the network
• media served to a TV
• audio playback
• heavy CPU task (compilation, compression...)

The sleep-when-idle daemon will take these use cases in consideration.

Features

Here are the possible elements monitored by sleep-when-idle to determine whether the system is idle:

• no X user inputs (requires xprintidle)
• idle CPU time
• network traffic
• audio output

You can also configure a wake-up time (requires rtcwake) to perform daily tasks.

Install

1. See sleep-when-idle.py -h for the various options.
2. Copy sleep-when-idle.service to /etc/systemd/system
3. Edit the file to enable the wanted options
4. Enable the service: systemctl enable sleep-when-idle

Runtime dependencies

• systemd for transition to sleep
• rtcwake to set a time for wake-up
• xprintidle to check user inputs to the X server
• pulseaudio to check for active audio output

Thanks

• ferncasado/DanglingPointer for the original idea
• the whole open source community for all the wonderful tools we are using everyday