How to waste CPU like a Professional

https://mostlynerdless.de/blog/2025/09/19/how-to-waste-cpu-like-a-professional/

by tanelpoder • 10 months ago

40 13 10 months ago

dmoy• 10 months ago

Ah very cool. I thought this was going to be a tongue-in-cheek article about the proliferation of random corporate-mandated CPU hogs like croudstrike or w/e.

Pleasantly surprised by the technical article :). Reminds me of a lot of precise-number-of-idle-cycles functions from embedded world in a prior life

PaulKeeble• 10 months ago

Likewise. Wasting user space CPU cycles is actually a moderately tricky thing to do when we have optimising compilers. Its not something that comes up a lot but it is occasionally something you do need to do in order to test other things and it is different to making a lot of system calls.

I think volatile is usually fairly well contained I can't immediately think of an obvious case where it could adjust the performance of the calling context indirectly but its pushing the problem onto that cache coherence part of the CPU so its not quite the same as an algorithm that consumes all the memory bandwidth or execution ports. Lots of little interesting trade offs in the weeds of this and other potential solutions depending on if any of this matters.

ai-christianson• 10 months ago

The "stress" command is pretty good for this.

parttimenerd• 10 months ago

I'm glad you like my article. I wasted far too much time researching and profiling my solutions. I'm writing a blog post every one to two weeks, so I hope you'll come back.

pcunite• 10 months ago

Would it use less power on ARM architecture?

ge963• 10 months ago

I have this compulsion to not close my laptop if the battery is over 90% so I would open up html5 fishbowl and crank it up to 50,000 fish per window.

I was looking for some script like count primes I could run

phi-go2• 10 months ago

Why not instead limit the charging level to 90%? Should save battery life as well.

ge963• 10 months ago

depends on the laptop if it has that setting or OS

woah• 10 months ago

These days it's all about wasting GPU like a professional

giveita• 10 months ago

Stop gatekeeping. With vibe coding anyone can waste GPU.

igtztorrero• 10 months ago

It's easy, just use Windows

How to waste CPU like a Professional

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