Levi Smith wrote:
Is this something built into the cpu?
I ask as I'm trying to determine what's going on with my laptop. I've had
intermittent issues with the new versions of Mepis (which also have
ksensors turned on by default so I can see my cpu temps) I've always noticed that
the fan changes speed a lot and is frequently lower in Windows, whereas in
Linux it's always on full-bore. I found athcool yesterday and I can't
believe the difference. Like I enter "athcool on" and bam it dropped
from a constant 170F to about 150F. It still goes up and down, but it's
definitely having a significant impact.
It sounds like your laptop is working pretty much as it should. ACPI
controls both fan speed and CPU throttling based on several factors,
such as load and heat. How well ACPI works on your laptop depends very
much on how recent the software controlling it is. Generally, the more
recent the kernel, the better ACPI works - assuming your laptop is
supported (doing
cat /proc/acpi/info may give some clues).
ANYWAY... My laptop works just fine in Windows, but in Mepis it starts out
fine, but at some point it starts lagging incredibly badly. Generally at
that point the CPU is at 100%.
But is the CPU running at full speed?
[A]nd the memory seems to be used more
than it should (like sometimes it's got almost 500MB used with nothing open),
but I can't really see anything that's using the processor or memory (at least
not in ksysguard or top).
Since trying athcool yesterday it seems to work better, but not flawless
like it used to...
Maybe the thermal trip points need to be tweaked. Maybe that's what
Athcool is doing; or is it just running the fan faster/more? At the risk
of being insulting, are you keeping all the fan ducts clear when you are
using the laptop?
Is it possible I'm somehow more stressing the cpu and it's overheating and
slowing to a crawl? (that still doesn't explain the memory usage)....
Any ideas?
Thanks!
Levi
Abnormal memory usage is another animal altogether.
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Best Regards,
~DJA.
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