[SOLVED] high baseline CPU usage

proximatecause

New Member
Feb 11, 2024
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Hello - I've been searching everywhere for an answer and figured it was time to reach out to the community for support.

I recently deployed a mini PC as a proxmox server with just a few VMs. Everything is "working" but I seem to have unusually high CPU usage even without any of the VMs running.

I have a 6 core / 12 thread Intel 8700T and 64GB of ram. The lowest my CPU usage gets to is just over 8%. If I have 3 VMs running but idle, the usage only goes up to about 10%. My minimum load never goes below 2. I've upgraded to the latest version of proxmox (kernel is 6.5.11-8-pve) and everything works (can use my VMs fine). Ram usage is reasonable (1.3GB). IO delay is 0.

I have all the scaling governors set to powersave. With no VMs running I typically have 8-10 of the "cores" running at the minimum 800mhz and the others pegged at 4Ghz. For whatever reason, there never seems to be any steps in between min and max for any one core. When I run my VMs actively, I generally end up with almost all of my cores pegged to 4Ghz, which I guess is what I would expect.

I have two processes which top always shows at the, well, top. Kworker+ is always 75% (+/- 0.3%) of my CPU and Ksoftirqd is always 25% (+/- 0.3%).

I'm not sure if this is a hardware issue, a software issue or no issue at all and I can't find any data to back my intuition that this feels like too high a load for an idle proxmox with no VMs started.

The one thing I can think of is that.I have a non-functioning pair of USB ports and that perhaps the kernel is constantly polling them or something like that.

Am I wrong? Is this just normal baseline overhead or should I keep digging?
 
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Solved!

I went into the BIOS and turned off the faulty pair of USB ports and now my baseline CPU usage is negligible (0.05% to 0.25%) with no VMs running.

Those two threads are no longer pegged and the frequencies on my cores have improved to what I would expect (ranges in between 800Mhz and 4Ghz).

Even with a few booted desktop VMs (idling), I'm seeing CPU usage as low as 1% (although it bounces around a bit). My cores are also running around 10+ deg cooler due to not turboing so often.

Maybe this will be helpful to someone else in the future.
 
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