Then, take a look at the available governors: $ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy?/scaling_available_governors or using cpupower, if available. As the name says, "powersave" would be the better choice. Take a look at https://wiki.debian.org/CpuFrequencyScaling as how to change the cpufreq governor permanently even when rebooting. I suppose, you somehow changed the default behavior. Regards, Jörg.