Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 147565
cpuspeed threshold too low, machine unnecessarily sluggish
Last modified: 2008-08-02 19:40:33 EDT
The default <threshold> parameter (second arg to -p) is too low. At 25%, it's too aggressive in slowing the CPU, should a momentary lull in activity come. During plain GUI interaction like dragging windows around, or running a mixed CPU+IO-intensive job like a compressed backup, the defaults turn CPU speeds down too eagerly. With a threshold setting of 80% for example, the machine feels snappier. It stays at a high cpuspeed if there is some activity, and still lets it go slow if a user is just sitting there. Please try it out, and consider changing the default. kernel-utils-2.4-13.1.49_FC3
By the way, my reference machine is a 3GHz P4, which can scale clock speeds from 10%-100%, which is perhaps a wider range than others see. I currently run cpuspeed with "-d -i 2 -p 20 80" and this results in a satisfactory throttling behavior.
Any news on this? Some applications are using CPU 100%, but /proc/cpuinfo still shows model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.60GHz stepping : 6 cpu MHz : 224.799 (I would have expected MHz to be 1600)
Is this still a problem in FC4, with the latest kernel ?
Fedora Core 3 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC5 updates or in the FC6 test release, reopen and change the version to match. Thank you!
Next rawhide build will use 20 and 80, which match up with the ondemand and conservative governor's scaling thresholds.