I have a laptop. I don't want to hear the fan ever. When I hear the fan, it means death usually. Programs start crashing and my laptop tries to burn a hole to the ground. No seriously, it can melt plastic chairs. You might say I have a bit of cooling problem, interestingly it gets the hottest near the GPU and memory area.

I've tried throttling. Basically my options are this 733mhz(burn off fingertips) and 1000 mhz (volcano hot) .

It runs OK at 733mhz but the problem is that individual programs I run can spike up the cpu usage to 99%.


Is there anyway I can hard limit cpu usage?

I don´t know if it´s avaible yet. Look at this discussion http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/lin...08.2/0362.html. It´s about limiting the cpu usage for a user/group (so you would use it for your user ).

I know that some programs have options to limit the resources they will use. Like apache for example. But it would take a longggggg time for you to config those things and most programs don´t have it.

I guess I'll try and mess with ulimit. Not exactly the user friendly this process can only use %80 of your cpu I was hoping for, though. Any recommended parameters?

Look there to see an alternate solution :

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/moi...ooling_station

It doesn't fit your "I don't want to hear the fan ever." requirement, though ...

Maybe you can throttle back on your CPU speed via the CMOS BIOS.

Is the computer on a hard surface when this happens? It should be on a hard surface because something like a blanket will act as a heat insulator. I've seen little lap tables for notebook computers. These lap tables have fans. Maybe that would be a good approach.

Oooh don't I wish. I would even settle for ulimit, if it actually truly did what I want it to to do.
The closest thing I could find is maximum number of seconds thread is allowed to hold on CPU.

???

So what, do I increase the seconds to reduce number of switches between threads(which could be potentially eating up the CPU)

or decrease the number of seconds in order to increase the switches between threads because some particular threads are eating up the cpu.

?

All in all a very confusing parameter. Everything else seems to be memory related.