Solved Overheating CPU and pacing tasks during build from ports

[gladiola]

I have a machine that I've been running all day. I know it is overheating, because I've seen the warnings. I checked the temperature with a command, below, and I know it's hot.

sysctl hw.acpi.thermal.tz0.temperature

Given that it's evident that the machine is interrupting the build from port because it is overheating, is there a common way to interrupt or stall the

make install clean

until a cooler temperature has been observed?

Like, "work on this, but if you are ___C, then wait until you cool to ___C to resume working."

I found the temperature commands, but beyond BIOS regulation, I haven't seen many examples of responding to these high temperature warnings. Just asking while my laptop is in the 'fridge.

 

[gladiola]

No, I could simply use one of my others; but, this was the first time I've had trouble with heat on a long time. I was wondering how to script around the problem. I'm supposing that few people pace the work to avoid the heat, but someone out there might.

 

[gladiola]

I'm going to mark the thread as solved because I think I took away the overheating condition.

I was working on a Lenovo T500. The task was building Chromium from ports. I loaded about 750 packages today from a poudriere tutorial exercise. My goal was to build the five or six programs that did not compile on the other machine.

This particular laptop is new to me; I just changed some BIOS settings. When I disabled "Intel 'SpeedStep' Technology" and set "Adaptive Thermal Management" to balanced, I saw a significant decrease in temperature. Before these changes, I was going from 37C to 97C to shutdown in under 5 minutes. That happened to me about three times in a row; I cooled the machine in a refrigerator for about an hour after my last overheating. Still, I observed a rapid spike in temperature and and overheating shutdown on the next run attempted. After these changes, with temperatures checked every half minute, I saw a common running temp during compiling from ports near 56C. The maximum operating temperature for this unit's CPU is 105C.

With the BIOS settings changed, and with an observed decrease in temperature under load, I think my problem was solved with this BIOS configuration change. Thanks for your time and efforts. J.

 

[ASX]

When I disabled "Intel 'SpeedStep' Technology" and set "Adaptive Thermal Management" to balanced, I saw a significant decrease in temperature.

That's a workaround and is going to reduce the CPU performance.
I would think that your machine need a cleanup around the fan/heatsink, is quite common in notebooks to accumulate dust in that area, ultimately preventing a proper air flow, and as a consequence higher CPU temperatures.