CPU Usage - Adjusting Affinity?

dmcushing · Joined: 30 Mar 2010 Posts: 6

I have a firstspot server that has a lot of concurrent clients (400-600) and the CPU usage is very high (100%). It serves as the Internet gateway for our college residence.
I have 4 CPUs in the firstspot server (VM) but it only seems to hit the first CPU (which is what the OS also uses).
Is there any way to divide the load across the CPUs more evenly so that my user experience isn't degraded by CPU usage?

alan · **Forum facilitator** Joined: 26 Sep 2003 Posts: 4435

FirstSpot has many threads and should take advantage of your multi-core or multi-CPU environment nicely. Refer to http://patronsoft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2692 for more discussion on this topic.

So I suspect your problem is related to your VM setting.
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dmcushing · Joined: 30 Mar 2010 Posts: 6

The httpd.exe process is only using core 1, and it is using 100% of the CPU when traffic is high. I do not see the httpd.exe process spreading the load across other cores, only CPU1.

I realize that this may be outside the design of FirstSpot, but was wondering if anyone knew a way of making httpd.exe spread its load a little more evenly like linux does. It doesn't seem to spawn threads across multiple cores.

alan · **Forum facilitator** Joined: 26 Sep 2003 Posts: 4435

The httpd.exe process should contain many threads, and it should spread fairly even among all cores/CPUs. Again, I still think this is an issue with your VM.
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dmcushing · Joined: 30 Mar 2010 Posts: 6

I'm running VMWare VSphere 4 and have the affinity settings properly set as far as I know - I've been using VMWare in our production environment for over 7 years. Are there special guidelines for VMs or VMWare? I have a lot of other VMs where the load is evenly spread across CPUs, so I don't think it is anything specific to the VM - I do see other threads on the other CPUs, but CPU1 is much more affected by FirstSpot than any of the other CPUs.

I am not blaming FirstSpot, I just want to maximize the performance of it.

alan · **Forum facilitator** Joined: 26 Sep 2003 Posts: 4435

We are not familiar with VMWare enough to comment.

Instead of using VMWare, just install FirstSpot on a "physical" PC. You should see Apache (and other FirstSpot-related processes) contains many threads. CPU load balancing is done in the thread level, so Windows will do the job of spreading the load.
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