Fan waves with no reason

[Keeper89]

Hello,

I have Debian 8.6 installed on a laptop with NVidia Optimus technology:

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01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108M [GeForce GT 525M] (rev ff) (prog-if ff)

I've successfully installed proprietary NVidia drivers + Bumblebee (as the official Debian documentation says) and

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optirun glxgears -info

command works fine.

The problem is that from time to time the fan waves for a second or more (suddenly speeds up and then became silent) during simple tasks such as opening new browser tab (Firefox gets 20-30% cpu) or even type here. It's disturbing, and is a very strange behavior.

Googling did't help. Do you have any ideas? Thanks in advance.

[sunrat]

Sounds like normal behaviour to me. Fan speed will automatically go up when temperature rises due to increased usage, then drop again when temperature falls.

[GarryRicketson]

My fan "waves", or changes speed depending on what I am doing
as well, I all ways considered it normal.
If and when I do not hear the fan come on at all, now that is when
I start to worry, and want to find out why, and also check the temperature.
If the fan is so noisy it is annoying, it might be time for a little maintenance,
or even a replacement.
Yes, open another tab on FireFox, will increase the cpu usage, and like wise
the fan will run at a higher speed for a little while.

I have a feeling I can guess what will be coming next,..but we'll see on that.

[stevepusser]

You should be able to install some kind of CPU temperature monitor on your panel if you want to see what's triggering the fan. Exactly what you put on the panel depends on your desktop.

Some of it might be due to how your Intel video driver is performing, since that's running Firefox, for example. Can you install inxi and report the terminal output of

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inxi -G

It's a good idea to update your PCI ID database first, too, with sudo or root:

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update-pciids

[Keeper89]

@stevepusser

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keeper@debian:~$ inxi -G
Graphics:  Card-1: Intel 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller
           Card-2: NVIDIA GF108M [GeForce GT 525M]
           Display Server: X.Org 1.16.4 drivers: intel (unloaded: fbdev,vesa)
           Resolution: 1366x768@60.00hz
           GLX Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel Sandybridge Mobile
           GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 10.3.2

You should be able to install some kind of CPU temperature monitor on your panel if you want to see what's triggering the fan. Exactly what you put on the panel depends on your desktop.

Avg and Max are at the bottom. Sometimes they go up to 55 and 62.

top utility sometimes shows too high values:

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top - 01:41:27 up 4 min,  2 users,  load average: 1,87, 1,10, 0,49
Tasks: 204 total,   2 running, 202 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 31,1 us,  2,2 sy,  0,1 ni, 63,2 id,  3,4 wa,  0,0 hi,  0,0 si,  0,0 st
KiB Mem:   8105672 total,  3165060 used,  4940612 free,    47356 buffers
KiB Swap:  9215996 total,        0 used,  9215996 free.   788516 cached Mem

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND               
 2105 keeper    20   0 3244484 1,157g  93332 R 126,3 15,0   1:09.15 firefox-esr           
 1262 keeper    20   0 1807588 146964  56084 S   4,0  1,8   0:20.13 gnome-shell           
  660 root      20   0  159740  20356  12540 S   3,0  0,3   0:04.97 Xorg                  
 1429 keeper    20   0  419736  29824  22580 S   2,0  0,4   0:00.65 gnome-terminal-       
 1862 keeper    20   0  794916 111592  64632 S   0,7  1,4   0:01.84 chrome                
  264 keeper   -51   0       0      0      0 S   0,3  0,0   0:01.02 irq/16-iwlwifi        
 1916 keeper    20   0  881288 122476  64308 S   0,3  1,5   0:01.30 chrome                
    1 root      20   0  193204   5324   3056 S   0,0  0,1   0:00.88 systemd

[debiman]

so you're talking about the cpu fan.
no surprises there: firefox takes resources, cpu heats up, fan starts up.

maybe you wanted to ask WHY firefox uses so much resources?
it's the internet of 2017!

[stevepusser]

Well, I actually meant some CPU temperature monitor that displays the value in the panel and updates every second or so, so you can keep an eye on it in real time as the fan goes on or off. Usually the kernel driver has some difference between the fan trigger temperature and the temperature at which it turns off or drops to a lower speed, such as "if temperature hits 55 c, then fan speed at 1000 rpm until temperature drop to 45 C, then fan speed drops to 500 rpm". This is to avoid annoying fan speed cycling at short intervals.

So you can watch the temperature to see at what temperature the fan cycles, to see if it's really too short.

Or maybe your machine is clogged up with dust inside, and could use a good cleaning to clean that stuff out. That can reduce fan noise quite a bit by keeping it cooler overall and opening up the airways.

[Keeper89]

Or maybe your machine is clogged up with dust inside, and could use a good cleaning to clean that stuff out. That can reduce fan noise quite a bit by keeping it cooler overall and opening up the airways.

I did it a couple of months ago.

So you can watch the temperature to see at what temperature the fan cycles, to see if it's really too short.

Usually fan starts at ~60 degrees. Average "no fan" temp. is about 50 deg.