[wonnage]

I think Apple's approach of attributing the capacity not available due to throttling (or various other reasons) to kernel_task might be the best. You can tell something is eating cpu, stuff isn't just stuck at 50% while the rest of the system looks idle.

Although then you have users trying to figure out how to kill kernel_task, which isn't great either...

[kuschku]

That’s actually an awesome idea, just create a virtual "cpu_throttling" task and attribute the throttling to this task.

[gervu]

Users trying to kill kernel_task sounds like an uncaught design problem. Replace the kill options in context drop-downs with "Why can't I kill kernel_task?" and have it pop open a short explanation, do the same as a feedback message if anyone tries to kill in the terminal.

If the system doesn't do that already, either nobody considered that users would try that particular nonsensical thing, or nobody cared enough to let users find out immediately instead of wasting their time thinking the computer was at fault.

[bombcar]

Yeah until I learned how to see the throttling with “pmset -g thermlog” I didn’t realize I was throttling so much.

I feel that should be made clear on the various CPU usage utilities.

[orthoxerox]

That's actually a great approach, just rename the process to "thermal_throttle" and it all becomes clear.