Best practice on Linux servers and CPU/power throttling?

Posted by Valentin on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Valentin
Published on 2014-05-27T14:51:51Z Indexed on 2014/05/27 15:29 UTC
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Filed under:

linux

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Performance

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power

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bios

I am running a couple of Debian 6 (2.6.32) and 7 (3.2) Linux servers and all of them have energy saving settings enabled in their BIOS. Furthermore Linux shows that the CPUs are throttled if the servers are idling.

I wonder if this could cause any harm - could there be e.g. performance impacts because Linux would not be able to handle throttling correctly?

Is there a best practice for Linux servers and power/CPU throttling? Do you guys switch your energy profiles to "performance" or do you leave both the BIOS and the OS with their default settings?

The reason I am asking is that I encountered several performance issues on physical Dell servers although all values (CPU/load, memory, I/O, network etc.) seemed to be normal. After changing the BIOS power settings to "performance" in those specific cases, I was able to get rid of the performance issues.

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