{"id":636,"date":"2010-12-30T13:39:00","date_gmt":"2010-12-30T13:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/blogs\/paul\/post\/Are-your-CPUs-running-slowly-Tool-tip-and-survey.aspx"},"modified":"2019-12-30T17:33:18","modified_gmt":"2019-12-31T01:33:18","slug":"are-your-cpus-running-slowly-tool-tip-and-survey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/are-your-cpus-running-slowly-tool-tip-and-survey\/","title":{"rendered":"Are your CPUs running slowly? Tool tip and survey"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Yes, I know I haven’t editorialized the last survey on <\/span>What’s in a Job Title<\/span><\/a> – I will in the New Year.) <\/span><\/p>\n

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve signed up a bunch of new customers for maintenance\/ops audits and general perf work and I’ve had all of them check whether power saving mode is enabled for their CPUs. And I’ve been astounded by the results – as have some of the customers who thought they were running at full speed all the time. <\/span><\/p>\n

In a nutshell, to save power the CPUs can essentially down-shift to a lower clock speed and then automatically speed up again when the load increases. But at what point do they speed up? That varies – you might have to really push things to make them speed up. <\/span><\/p>\n

And do you really want your workload running slower until the CPU usage hits the magic speed-up threshold? Most likely the answer is no. <\/span><\/p>\n

So the point of this blog post – I’d like you to go check the CPU speeds on your systems and see whether they’re in power-saving mode without you knowing. I think you’ll be surprised. And then I want you to tell me what you saw. <\/span><\/p>\n

You can check the CPU speed using the <\/span>free CPU-Z tool<\/span><\/a> – it’s awesome. It’s just asks the CPU it’s speed – no load is put on the system.<\/span><\/p>\n

The picture below shows a CPU-Z snapshot from a client system. The CPUs are spec’d at 2.4GHz but as you can see, they’re only running at 1.2GHz – half speed. <\/span><\/p>\n

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Go download the tool and run it on your system – what did you see? <\/span><\/p>\n


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