I was wondering why one of my program was taking ~15 seconds to compile when my colleague compiled it within ~3 seconds on his system. I know there are a performance price to pay for the virtualisation but nonetheless. I was super annoyed and I vaguely thinking about switching back to another distribution but at the same time I was reading about DNS rebinding attacks and I really wanted to stay on Qubes.
I gave a look at the BIOS settings, in the power management section. There are options like "Maximize performance on AC" and also options for when the laptop is on battery. I already had the "Maximize performance on AC" on. I disabled the whole power management section. Performance are better!
The program mentioned above now compiles in ~5 seconds. The whole systems seems more responsive, Firefox and Youtube video (HTML5) seems also better. The only drawback is that the laptop is definitively generating more heat (and probably consuming more energy) but that's okay because I spend most of the time connected to the AC.
Is there a bug somewhere in the kernel, in Xen or Qubes which prevent them to properly use this BIOS power management system correctly?
Have other users experience something similar?
When googling I found this article from VMWare with similar problems / solutions
Best regards,
K.
Lenovo X240.