high average load and kernel recompilation

[Pol]

<posted & mailed>

Mario Vukelic wrote:
> Ah, a tablet. I know that one from the company, it's pretty slow. It's a
> single-core CPU, right (Intel Pentium M 760?)
yes, it is Pentium M
  
>> (but i am used to keep it in 'powersave'
>> mode, at 0.8GHz) ,
> What does this mean? AFAIK Ubuntu (and I would guess Kubuntu) uses an
> on-demand CPU governor by default.
Yes that is the default, but it can be changed. That helps to keep laptop
from overheating (fan is working, yet it starts only at very high
temperature)
 
> 
> So, my question would be, did you change that, and do you keep your CPU
> throttled to a fixed speed even if you have high load? In this case you
> should look no further for now and see whether the load continues to be
> so high on average even it the CPU runs at full speed. After all, you'd
> be throttling it to less than half its (less than spectacular as it is)
> speed.

'powersave' policy  has been set, even when it is mains powered.  That keeps
frequency at 800MHz. I have seen no option about throttling.
I had made an experimennt to compare loading at 1.7GHz and 0.8GHz and found
that,  at 1.7GHz, loading lowered of about 1 - 1.5  
How do you explain that cpu frequency affects loading?
 
> 
> 
> Um. You are running 5 users concurrently from a tc 4200 (possibly even
> throttled?) and you complain about an average load of 5?

I don't see any 'throttling' option 

> I run one user on an HP nc6400 (2GB RAM) with evolution, terminal(s),
> firefox, liferea, video player, and transmission.  I currently have load
> average: 0.22, 0.81, 1.42

So, five similar users would rise load to about 1?
Here firefox takes about 17% of my cpu time.
Other heavy programs are nspluginviewers (7-17 %), ktorrent (10%), konqueror
(3-10%, each one of them), Xorg itsef (5-15%)
 
> 
> I dunno, to me this sounds like "to be expected", but maybe someone else
> can chip in,

Thanks 
--P