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Not worried, just curious: I'm currently running Handbrake 1.10 on my new Dell Inspiron 3576 with Bionic 18.04, and I see that all cores are working nice and hard. :) However, with all 8 virtual cores going (it's an I5 with 4 physical and 8 virtual cores) I see that all cores have pretty much the same load (which is as it should be) but the load of each core doesn't exceed 90% (give or take a few tenth of a percent). On occasion I have seen a single core max out to 100% for a number of seconds (not unusual) but now that all 8 cores are equally engaged, the load appears to be subject to a 90% limit.

Is this by design? If so, would that be a Linux feature, a Handbrake feature, or a property of the hardware?

It makes sense not to max out all cores completely (both in terms of keeping the system responsive and not frying the hardware) but I haven't seen this yet (not having run this version of Ubuntu and not having had recent and decent hardware until now) so I'm wondering what it is that I'm seeing here.

Frank van Wensveen
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1 Answers1

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To test CPU capability outside of handbrake, you can force CPUs to 100%. Below are the steps from this answer: How do I stress test CPU and RAM (at the same time)?.

You can install stress with:

sudo apt install stress

Then call it with:

stress --cpu 8 --io 4 --vm 4 --vm-bytes 1024M --timeout 10s

On my conky display notice how:

  • In the top section CPU utilization spikes from 3% to 100%
  • In the middle the temperature spikes from 60C to 80C
  • At the bottom memory spikes from normal 2.75 GiB to 6.25 GiB

stress test.gif

Type stress --help for a full list of options.

WinEunuuchs2Unix
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