Battery life decreased after upgraded to Lion

Has anyone noticed any battery life decrease after upgrading to Lion?

I'm on MacBook Pro (mid-2010). Before, on Snow Leopard, when unplugged I had minimum 5hrs of life. Now, it's not much above 4hrs at best. Is this a common problem?

I notice the estimate battery life now fluctuates a lot more than before, too.

UPDATE

Battery life is definitely lower than before upgrading. I'm getting up to about 5hrs of work now while I was able to pull out 6-7 before.

Re RAM usage. I'm not a heavy RAM user tbh. I always have at least 0.5GB RAM completely free and most of the time it's around 1GB free at least so this can't be it.

Solution 1:

Yes!

Both me and my girlfriend have had the feeling that the battery life has decreased significantly with Lion on our 2010 MacBook Pro's, compared to Snow Leopard. Especially when the machine is "sleeping" (when you just close the lid). Unfortunately, we don't have any numbers to back this up (yet).

I've been trying to determine what the problem could be, but it's a bit tricky due to the sheer amount of variable factors. We're pretty much running the same applications as before, and nothing seems to be out of the ordinary when examining the running processes and hardware utilization. We've both got 8GB or RAM, which should be more than enough for Lion (it doesn't write to scratch).

Solution 2:

Rather than looking at the estimated time remaining, use your machine to determine if there is an actual difference or if it's just a change in the battery-life-remaining algorithm

Solution 3:

Lion is said to run best with 4GB of ram. Snow Leopard didn't demand that much. I haven't tested Lion on older systems, but it is logical to conclude that because it demands more of your machine it will decrease battery life.