Throttling

[Notinkeys]

Does the Pi 3 employ throttling for heat or insufficient power? My Pi is incedibly slow and I am trying to figure out why.

[jamesh]

Yes. https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentati ... agement.md

[drgeoff]

Does the Pi 3 employ throttling for heat or insufficient power?

Heat, yes. Insufficient power, no.

[jamesh]

Does the Pi 3 employ throttling for heat or insufficient power?

Heat, yes. Insufficient power, no.

The low voltage event will cause some sort of throttling to be done, but cannot remember exactly what - might just prohibit turbo mode or similar . Will find out more details once knowlegable guy is in office.

[Imperf3kt]

Does the Pi 3 employ throttling for heat or insufficient power?

Heat, yes. Insufficient power, no.

In my experience it does.

[Notinkeys]

Thanks. Is there a way to determine if that is happening? My Pi 3 is horrendously slow. Using Ubuntu Mate.

[ejolson]

Thanks. Is there a way to determine if that is happening? My Pi 3 is horrendously slow. Using Ubuntu Mate.

The Raspberry Pi uses a nonstandard method involving mailboxes and the GPU to report what the current CPU clock rate is. In Raspbian there is a command vcgencmd that can be used to obtain the current clock speed.

One of the main purposes of benchmarks (aside from advertising faster computers) is to verify a system is performing as expected. I have run the Linpack benchmark on a Pi 3B+ and obtained 6.718 Gflops. If you run the same benchmark and obtain noticeably slower results, that would confirm that your 3B+ is experiencing some sort of throttling. Note that a script which uses vcgencmd to monitor the CPU clock speed is also described in my benchmarking post.

[jahboater]

Throttling events are recorded, try ...

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vcgencmd get_throttled

If non-zero, the bits in the hex number returned may interpreted as:

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1010000000000000101  <- 19 bits  rpi 3b+
|||             |||_ under-voltage
|||             ||_ currently throttled
|||             |_ arm frequency capped
|||_ under-voltage has occurred since last reboot
||_ throttling has occurred since last reboot
|_ arm frequency capped has occurred since last reboot

But note the initial 200MHz soft limit throttle is not recorded here.
It is now (by default) set to 60C, but you can increase it with:

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temp_soft_limit=70

This little script is handy for monitoring the important stuff:

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#!/bin/bash
Counter=14
DisplayHeader="Time      Temp    CPU        Throttle        Vcore"
while true ; do
  let Counter++
  if [ ${Counter} -eq 15 ]; then
    echo -e "${DisplayHeader}"
    Counter=0
  fi
  Health=$(perl -e "printf \"%19b\n\", $(vcgencmd get_throttled | cut -f2 -d=)")
  Temp=$(vcgencmd measure_temp | cut -f2 -d=)
  RealClockspeed=$(vcgencmd measure_clock arm | awk -F"=" '{printf ("%0.0f",$2/1000000); }' )
  CoreVoltage=$(vcgencmd measure_volts | cut -f2 -d= | sed 's/000//')
  echo -e "$(date '+%H:%M:%S') ${Temp} $(printf '%4s' ${RealClockspeed})MHz $(printf '%019d' ${Health}) ${CoreVoltage}"
  sleep 60
done