Nvidia Datacenter Driver Tesla Slow nvidia-smi response and high utilization with 0 usage
nvidia-smi
Tue Apr 7 15:48:11 2026
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 570.211.01 Driver Version: 570.211.01 CUDA Version: 12.8 |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
| 0 Tesla M40 24GB Off | 00000000:05:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 29C P0 56W / 250W | 0MiB / 23040MiB | 57% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=========================================================================================|
| No running processes found |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
There are 0 processes using the GPU but it says 57% usage and nvidia-smi loads very slow. Here is the fix, just set power management like this:
nvidia-smi -pm 1
Enabled Legacy persistence mode for GPU 00000000:05:00.0.
All done.
Tue Apr 7 15:50:46 2026
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 570.211.01 Driver Version: 570.211.01 CUDA Version: 12.8 |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
| 0 Tesla M40 24GB On | 00000000:05:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 30C P0 60W / 250W | 0MiB / 23040MiB | 0% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=========================================================================================|
| No running processes found |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Tags:
nvidia, datacenter, tesla, smi, utilization, usagenvidia, tue, apr, cuda, gpu, persistence, disp, volatile, uncorr, ecc, temp, perf, pwr, usage, util, compute, mig, gb, mib, default, processes, gi, ci, pid, loads, pm, enabled, legacy, mode,