There are many aspects that can affect the power consumption of an application, and they will vary greatly depending on the equipment used.
The easiest way to get an idea is to measure it . If your program does heavy calculations, it's pretty easy to measure the difference. Just read the usage while the application is running and subtract the usage, not.
If your application does not belong to heavy computing, then the task is distributed more, since a simple 1-point time comparison will not do the trick. You can get a measuring device that can record usage over time, in which you will need to compare with the registered technology of your device and try to filter out all other scheduled tasks (checking for updates, etc.).
Just tell me if you want to go this route, APC UPS comes with this built-in functionality, and PowerChute stores the power consumption log in the access database (C: \ Program Files \ APC \ PowerChute Personal Edition \ EnergyLog.mdb). I'm not sure if this is true for all models, but it was a great extra feature that came with mine ( Pro 550 ). I would post the data along with the Xperf trace (a free built-in profiler on Windows, see the review here ) to correlate the power changes with the activity of your applications and filter out scheduled tasks, etc.
However, remember that you will get different results on different hardware. Ssd will be different from a traditional hard drive, and the grafix adapter used may also make a difference, so you can get a rough estimate of the overall by measuring a “typical” system. Desktop systems will consume more than laptops, etc. (Also see this blog post ).
Power profiling tools are more common for mobile devices. I am not an expert in this field, but I know that there are several tools there .