@stargeneral I realise it was some time ago, but thanks for your research here.
I came across this same issue recently as I noticed an average CPU increase on my home IPFire system which appeared to be caused by an update.
I too tried installing cpufreq-utils and added cron jobs to set “performance” during the day and “ondemand” over night, however even during the periods when “ondemand” was set the system seems to have higher average CPU usage.
I thought that the governor could be changed on demand?!
Has anyone had any success in doing this?
@stargeneral regarding power comparisons with Windows, have you looked in to applying general powersaving things on Linux? It seems that PowerTOP can’t work on IPFire any more, but I can share a script I use which applies the equivalent power saving anyway, if you’re still interested.
Thank you!
For reference, the cron job I’ve tried is as simple as:
# Change CPU governor to "ondemand" powersaving during periods of less activity
0 08 * * * root for g in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor; do echo 'performance' > $g; done
0 22 * * * root for g in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor; do echo 'ondemand' > $g; done
@jon it was unhelpful to split this to a new topic.
You have taken the post away from the context of what it was in reply to and the people in the original thread won’t be notified to reply.
Thanks, but it’s not an obvious problem. I also wanted to discuss some points of others from the thread this started in, such as understanding the power draw difference people had observed between ondemand and performance (suggestions were not much of a difference).
model name : Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU J1900 @ 1.99GHz
and I can confirm it’s currently supposed to be set to ondemand but based on the history is performing just like performance did (and not how it performed two months ago):
More time has passed making it easier to see that this may not be a problem.
I’m not sure it’s saving much power, but I use a cron job to change CPU scaling governor between performance and ondemand daily. This results in an average CPU frequency roughly half-way between performance and ondemand. In the yearly graph below you can see that the average is roughly between the low average frequencies of February and the high average frequencies of March.
This year’s graph: Scale is from 1.55k to 2.2k
This week’s graph: Scale is from 1.35k to 2.2k
You can see more detail in the weekly graph than in the yearly. CPU frequency does drop as low as 1.4k on my system (a Celeron J1900 CPU).
