Processor Speed?

[William Haller]

You also might want to tweak the settings in /etc/sysconfig/cpuspeed. I typically set the UP_THRESHOLD to 11 and the DOWN_THRESHOLD to 10 - would go lower but those seem to be hard coded limits. I also append -i 5 -r -n -w to OPTS and set IGNORE_NICE to 0 so background processes get the benefit of a faster CPU to get done as well.

[MNKyDeth]

To add a bit more from my perspective.

If you have a quad core cpu and you have one program that is not multi-threaded it should peg one core at 100%. That one core should be at max mhz/ghz if it is a single thread. The rest of the cores will basically be idling and handle any random process's that occur and will most likely be at the minimum mhz/ghz value.

If you have a multi-threaded application like Handbrake all cores should max to 100% and be at the max mhz/ghz values. If the core do not reach the max value then there might be an issue with the throttling settings.

[Simian Man]

Originally Posted by Simian Man

I have tried manually specifying the MAX_SPEED to be 2501000 and the MIN_SPEED to be 1000000 in the /etc/sysconfig/cpuspeed file. Before they were just empty which means they rely on the CPU to report the values, which maybe wasn't working. I am hoping that will allow me to run anywhere between those two values depending on the workload.

This did work for me. Now the processors all run at the MIN_SPEED unless I run something computationally intensive in which case they shoot up to the MAX_SPEED. I still don't know why this didn't happen for me by default, but no matter. Thanks everyone for the help, I learned a lot from this thread .

[PabloTwo]

For you to set your min/max cpu speed to something other than what the "ondemand" governor would automatically select and use, I think you may need to set your governor to "userspace".

BASH:~/-> sudo cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors
ondemand userspace performance

But I may very well be wrong about that.
Edit: OK.. whoops! I misread your above post thinking you said "This didn't work for me." when in fact you said "This did work for me.". You are now entitled to 3 free Nose Thumbs at PabloTwo.