Best practice on Linux servers and CPU/power throttling?
- by Valentin
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.