I've been assessing new hardware options for Mozilla to issue to developers. As part of evaluating some dual socket Xeon processors, I found some unexpected behavior: these processors routinely underclock in Windows 10 unless several cores or are used. Contrast with the behavior of my i7 Skylake processor, which seems to ramp up to full clock pretty rapidly, even when only a single core is used.
The Windows 10 power settings appear to set the minimum CPU frequency at 5% or 10% of maximum. When I cranked this up to 100%, artifact build time dropped from ~170s to ~77s and full build configure dropped from ~165s to ~97s! If you are a Windows user with Xeons in your desktop, you may want to visit Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Power Options -> Edit Plan Settings -> Change advanced power settings -> Process power management -> Minimum processor state and crank that up and see what happens. Note: running your CPU at 100% all the time may impact your power bill! Bug 1323106 has been opened to track improving the ability of the build system (namely `mach doctor`) to improve matters. If you would like to report success/failure of changing power settings or if you know a thing or two about CPU power management and can provide technical assistance, please weigh in there. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
