How to cut your performance in half...

[dba]

This has been posted before - and in fact it's almost common knowledge - but it bit me again today and so it perhaps bears repeating:

If you have a Windows server, putting the OS and BIOS into anything other than "high performance" mode will destroy performance.

I have been running a pile of ETL on my DL585 G7 this week - around 60 billion rows so far. CPU utilization is nil - around 5% - and the disk IO barely registers, and yet I'm still able to push data rows through a 50-step ETL flow with 7 lookup steps at a rate of 50K rows/second. Then I noticed that I was in "balanced" performance mode in the Windows control panel. I switched to "high performance" mode and the ETL load rate instantly shot up to 120K rows/second. Power consumption went from 560 watts to 585 watts.

So basically the "power saving" feature was reducing power consumption by 4% and in return reducing throughput by 60%. That's a painful trade-off!

 

[mrkrad]

yup so many folks with dual 6 core intel xeon's sitting in P12 all day around 20 % utilization in esxi

You'd have thought they would have worked it out to act like phones (boost on wake, hold for a minute or so on demand, taper off) rather than a simple sampling method?

 

[Aluminum]

The gamer world learned this the hard way too, and you have to worry about more than the cpu.
Some gpu drivers and vga bios can get their configuration messed up and hold at desktop or media playback clocks even when a fullscreen 3D is running, its about the most annoying thing in the world when it happens.

 

[Mike]

The gamer world learned this the hard way too, and you have to worry about more than the cpu.
Some gpu drivers and vga bios can get their configuration messed up and hold at desktop or media playback clocks even when a fullscreen 3D is running, its about the most annoying thing in the world when it happens.

Multi-monitor & Flash are the main culprits of that behaviour. It sucks.

 

[richardm]

I'm wondering if these issues are fixed in 2012 R2 and/or Haswell. I have this combination and I've been playing with core parking and other efficiency settings. So far I've been unable to hurt performance with core parking. :-/

 

[NeverDie]

This has been posted before - and in fact it's almost common knowledge - but it bit me again today and so it perhaps bears repeating:

If you have a Windows server, putting the OS and BIOS into anything other than "high performance" mode will destroy performance.

I have been running a pile of ETL on my DL585 G7 this week - around 60 billion rows so far. CPU utilization is nil - around 5% - and the disk IO barely registers, and yet I'm still able to push data rows through a 50-step ETL flow with 7 lookup steps at a rate of 50K rows/second. Then I noticed that I was in "balanced" performance mode in the Windows control panel. I switched to "high performance" mode and the ETL load rate instantly shot up to 120K rows/second. Power consumption went from 560 watts to 585 watts.

So basically the "power saving" feature was reducing power consumption by 4% and in return reducing throughput by 60%. That's a painful trade-off!

In general, what do "power saving" features do that have such a hugely negative impact on performance?