Steven W. Orr writes that a fan in his PC changes pitch depending on whether
he is running setiathome:
My guess is that the fan runs slower because, without
setiathome running, the cpu really does run cooler, because it is
halted most of the time. Linux doesn't just burn cycles when it is
really idle, but halts the cpu. Interrupts from the clock tick and
other devices, like the keyboard and maybe network interface, wake it
up as necessary, but, assuming that it's a really fast cpu, that keeps
it un-halted only a small percentage of the time. Setiathome is
compute bound, so it runs instead of waiting on something (like the
screen saver effectively waiting on a clock tick), and the cpu never
halts.
Any compute bound task should do the same thing. You can check
by writing a trivial delay loop in your favorite language (a real old
fashioned delay loop, no calling sleep). Run it with setiathome stopped
and the fan, I bet, will stay fast.
The point of setiathome is that your cpu usually is doing
nothing. When the cpu is *really* doing nothing, Linux lets you save
power and heat (and some of the aging that heat causes).
Bill
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