Having recently set up a laptop that had been dropped on its screen to use as a headless Linux server (Ubuntu 5.4 – Hoary Hedgehog) I discovered that its CPU was not running to its full potential – the cause was that the funky magic that makes the processor scale back to save power was active.
This presented a problem, as am mainly using this machine as a mini compile farm as well as a compute node. (1500Mhz in the form of a Pentium-M is actually quite useful). The solution:
Install cpudynd (actually I used apt-get install cpudyn) I then added -nice to its options to ensure that nice processes would be taken into account when deciding to throttle the speed up or down.
Now the Centrino based system (Dell 600m) with its Penitum-M running Ubuntu Linux scales the processor frequency much better.
(another viable solution would be to run cpufreq-selector -f $max_cpuspeed_in_khz where max_cpuspeed_in_khz is an integer that relates diecrectly to your system).
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