I'm developing a DAPP in a laptop. I setup a private test blockchain with one node to develop locally and do not have to spend real ethers.
It works fine, but when I start mining, the laptop gets noisy like a plane and the batteries get low too fast.
I'm asking if exists any trick to just mine slowly without consuming my batteries.
Right now, I'm mining about one block per second. It would be also good to mine one every 10-15 second or so. (Like the frontier chain).
The easiest way, if you have a multi-core CPU:
geth --mine --minerthreads "1"
This should restrict mining to one CPU core.
Alternatively, you could try your luck with this script I wrote a while ago to turn mining on and off periodically. There's also an optional config file you can edit to change some of its parameters. Invoke it like so (adding your usual arguments as well, of course):
geth --mine --minerthreads=1 mine.js
You might also have some luck with Iuri Matias' Embark framework, which throttles private chain mining by default, IIRC.
You can also specify the number of cores from the console:
miner.start(1)
