Recently I’ve been putting together a page of useful tools for system administrators and developers to understand and debug bottlenecks in a XenServer installation. I’ve also been working with a lot of CAD and 3-D graphically intense applications looking at optimal configurations for benchmarking of technologies like vGPU and GPU-passthrough. One of tools I’ve been investigating to profile CPU usage is CPU-Z.
Some of the CAD applications and benchmarks are proving rather fond of a single core and can show improvement if you configure XenServer to allow the CPUs to use turbo mode.As Intel details on their own page:
Intel® Turbo Boost Technology provides more performance when needed on 4th generation Intel® Core™ processor-based systems. Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 automatically allows processor cores to run faster than the Thermal Design Power (TDP) configuration specified frequency if they’re operating below power, current, and temperature specification limits.
I’ve put together a page on how to enable turbo mode, C-states and P-states. Plus how to check it is enabled and investigate how it is behaving and a few known issues associated with Intel errata affecting Intel Nehalem and Westmere processors. I’ve also included some example logs and instructions on how to interpret the CPU frequency results you may see.
So here you go: how to enable turbo mode, C-states and P-states
This should be useful to those working with Citrix XenServer for server virtualisation or as a platform for XenDesktop, CloudPlatform, Netscaler SDX or similar.
