alt Hacker NewsCraziest I got was users complaining their laptops were getting too hot / too noisey because I correctly parallelized a task and it became too efficient. They liked the speed but hated the fans going on at full speed and the CPU (and hence the whole laptop) getting really warn (talking circa 2010). So I had to artificially slow down processing a bit as to not make the fans go brrrrr and CPU go too hot.
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astrange • last Monday at 3:09 AM
You probably wanted a low thread priority/QoS setting. The OS knows how to run threads such that they don't heat up the CPU. Well, on modern hardware it does anyway.
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If the fan was turning on where it wasn't before, it seems like cooling was once happening through natural dissipation, but after your fix it needed fans to cool faster. So the fix saved time but burnt extra electricity (and the peacefulness of a quiet room.)
This is pretty easy to understand IMO. About 70% of the time I hear machine's fans speed up I silently wish the processing would have just been slower. This is especially true for very short bursts of activity.