On Thu, 10 Jan 2013, Carl Turney <carl@boms.com.au> wrote:
Thunderbird is doing a major re-indexing of messages, which is really pushing my CPU to its limits. (i.e. getting over 60C core temperature, email process using 100-160% of CPU usage - dual core CPU)
If a system has no hardware faults and is running in a suitable environment then it should be able to sustain 100% use on all CPU cores indefinitely. If the system gets too hot in such use (as my Thinkpad T61 does) then the hardware is at best badly designed and probably just broken. As an aside modern CPUs change CPU frequency as appropriate (the command cpufreq-info gives you information on this) and some of them are designed to run at unsustainable speeds for short periods of time. My T61 will have core temperatures well in excess of 60C when idling (system load average well below 0.5) in an environment that isn't particularly warm (ambient temperature well below 25C) and which has reasonable ventilation (sitting on a flat table with no vents obscured). I believe that my T61 is broken in some way, but it works well enough that I haven't felt the need to pay to get it fixed. Anyway core temperatures well in excess of 80C at times when there's high ambient temperatures (EG 30C+) or moderate load (any reasonable compile) haven't seemed to hurt my Thinkpad. While it would be nice to be able to limit an application to some portion of CPU time you haven't given us any reason to think there's a real problem here. 60C shouldn't be a big deal. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/