Yes I wish there was more conclusive advice on this point.
There are conflicting issues:
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The default performance governor was changed from 'performance' to 'ondemand'.
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Reducing power is great, but increasing e-waste is not.
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There is the theory that capacitor-related aging is temperature dependent, and so running at higher temperature for longer will give rise to faster wear. But in my mind I'm dubious about this. Isn't the aging rate such that we are talking different numbers of decades (e.g. 80 years vs 50 years), at which point our RT3200's will be obsolete anyway? Or doesn't thermal cycling up and down like a YoYo actually worsen things, potentially? Since YoYo'ing temperature means more rapid expansion and contraction of parts?
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There's also some speculation that the CPU clock variation might hurt SQM especially w.r.t bursty traffic. Logical (and at least one of the original CAKE developers seems to share this concern), but I haven't actually seen any concrete data demonstrating any such hurt. My guess is that this might make a difference in the 0-5ms range, but this is only speculation based on my own testing on my 4G connection.
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There were some scary reboot problems relating to low CPU rates.
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There is some concern about possible data corruption issues relating to variable CPU rates. Such corruption issues seem to be potentially bricking devices at the moment.
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MediaTek apparently stated that they only ever tested running at full rate all the time. Perhaps this is dispositive? Please see this report:
Should we all just run our RT3200's with the 'performance' governor to be on the safe side? I think I'm beginning to lean towards thinking that we should. And perhaps this should be made the default again? I mean do we really know better than those who actually designed this hardware? Isn't that a profound and foolish arrogance?
I wonder what the consensus is in respect of the performance governor:
- I think it is better to use: 'ondemand'
- I think it is better to use: 'performance'
- I do not know.