Tim: >> Is the CPU cooling still working fine? Overheating can cause slowdowns. Oliver Ruebenacker: > Interesting! How can I test this? Does the fan move air well, is it clogged, can you visually inspect it, does the temperature change if you *VERY* *BRIEFLY* block airflow. > Do you know what mechanism causes the slowdown? Most modern CPUs have a temperature sensor. As a self preservation exercise, many will slow down operations if they start to get too hot, as that will reduce the amount of heat the CPU produces. > Is it consistent with showing high CPU usage? If the CPU is doing a lot of work, or running fast (for those that have speed control), it will generate heat. The more work and speed, the more heat. Also, in one of life's peculiarities, if slowing down the CPU means it takes significantly longer to get the job done, slowing it down mightn't be the life saver that it's supposed to be, as it may still get hot enough, for long enough, to be a problem. With really inadequate cooling, you can fry things in mere seconds. I got quite worried when my laptop suddenly went nuts the other day, for no good reason. Typically, it's running around the 50 degree mark for both CPU and graphics processors, but it surges depending on the work load, often to around 60 (it used to be about 5-10 degrees less, and I can reproduce that by swapping the hard drive for the old one that still has Fedora 7 on it). I loaded up some webpage, and it rapidly skyrocketed to 80, the fan turned on hard, and some rather nasty smells emerged. I'm guessing plastic nearby the hotspot, or heatsink material. I killed the Firefox web browser smartish, and it settled down to a reasonable temperature within a few seconds. No the vents were not blocked, and I have checked for things that might clog airflow. It strikes me that many laptops are very poorly designed, with air intake vents on the bottom, that will be blocked if you actually do use it on your lap. > Actually, I also felt sometimes that my laptop was quite hot, long > before I had slowdown issues. And sometimes the fan would seem to gear > up, even with no one using the laptop. Mine used to run quite cool and quiet, but not since Fedora 9. Just sitting at the logon screen its churning away. So I have yet another thing I don't like about the new GDM (it's not just spinning the fans more than needed, they're expelling quite a bit of heat). If I logon and do nothing, it cools down a bit, sometimes enough that it runs nearly silently; but that's rare, these days. But, if I leave it alone, and it's idling just showing the empty desktop (no applications running), sometimes it'll suddenly warm up. And it's not like a cron job has kicked in, there's no indication of that if I leave top running. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.19-78.2.30.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
