What is % of Maximum Frequency (Perf Monitor)?

[Pat Coghlan]

For a long time I wondered why it took minutes from the time I clicked
on a URL in an e-mail (Thunderbird) until the web page opened in
Firefox. The problem is present on my Dell laptop, but it's generally
not a problem with my desktop(s).

I investigated several counters in the performance monitoring utility,
and finally discovered that the counter called "% of Maximum Frequency"
kept ratcheting up to 100%. See
http://web.ncf.ca/~ff293/Images/For Newgroup.png

I can't find a good description of what this counter really indicates.

Can anyone shed some light on this please?

Thanks.

-Pat

 

[Randy Scarborough]

----- Original Message -----

For a long time I wondered why it took minutes from the time I clicked on
a URL in an e-mail (Thunderbird) until the web page opened in Firefox. The
problem is present on my Dell laptop, but it's generally not a problem
with my desktop(s).

I investigated several counters in the performance monitoring utility, and
finally discovered that the counter called "% of Maximum Frequency" kept
ratcheting up to 100%. See
http://web.ncf.ca/~ff293/Images/For Newgroup.png

I can't find a good description of what this counter really indicates.

Can anyone shed some light on this please?

Thanks.

-Pat

My Athlon 3200+ is able to operate at 2000 MHz (100%), at 1800 MHz (90% of
2000), or at 1000 MHz (50%). The frequency can be adjusted dynamically
by an AMD process called CoolNQuiet or by software such as RightMark's
RMClock utility. These bump up the frequency when the system is doing
something CPU-intensive and drop it down when the system moves toward idle.
Intel processors have a similar ability but I do not know what it is called.

The "% of Maximum Frequency" reports the ratio between the current frequency
(at the instant it was measured) and the maximum (2000 MHz in my case). On
my system it is always one of the three legal values mentioned above. I
have some software that reads the AMD hardware register containing the
current frequency, and this value and the "% of Maximum Frequency"
measurement move synchronously.

The above is based on observation and experimentation but not on specific
documentation of the counters. It seems accurate enough for my usage.

Randy Scarborough

 

[Pat Coghlan]

I suspected it may be related to the clock (FSB?) rate.

I have a Dell Lattitude laptop, so I imagine there's another app
tweaking the frequency.