[u-u] Zoom struggle last night

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: arocker at Vex.Net

| I've had a couple of occasions when the machine inexplicably got very hot,
| very high CPU usage, (cause or effect of heat?) then shut down. It may
| just have been a coincidental hardware problem.

Your crash is likely cause by overheating.  Modern CPUs have
protection agains overheating.  If the OS doesn't prevent it, the CPU
will shut down.  This may be the crash you are seeing.

Perhaps this notebook has accumulated dust inside.  If it's easy to
disassemble, consider checking for that.

Ultimately, most heat is caused by high CPU or GPU usage.  Not the
other way around.

When your CPU gets hot, Linux should reduce the clock rate in an
attempt to reduce heat generation.

(This has the side-effect of reducion the denominator in the
calculation of the CPU usage.  So you might see a spike in reported
CPU usage.)

You might find that making throttling happen at a lower threshold
would prevent crashes.  Unfortunately I've never changed thresholds so
I don't know how to do it.