quad core xeon

[Edward 'cen' Fiberesima]

Hi,

I've installed Sybase ASE 15.0.3 on a quad core xeon. It is a 32-bit
OpenSUSE 11.1 machine with multi core and big memory compiled in. If I
run a cpu intensive stored procedure I find that only one of the cores
is maxxed out while the others are doing next to nothing. Is this
normal? Is there a sort of core load balancer that I should be using?
Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Ed

[Bret Halford [Sybase]]

That isn't abnormal. A process can only be running on one engine
at a time, so if you only have one active user process, then you would
only see one cpu very busy. There are a couple of ways to spread out
the work more - one is to have more clients submitting work. The other
is to configure for worker processes, "max parallel degree" and "max
scan parallel degree". The worker processes allow the work of some
of your scans to be split across engines. However, 15.0.x doesn't
make as much use of worker processes than 12.5.x did (some of the new
single-threaded strategies are more effective than the older
multi-threaded ones). Still, it would be the main way to spread the
work out. You could also crank up the asynchronous prefetch setting,
that might make more use of the idle engines.

-bret

[Edward 'cen' Fiberesima]

Thanks for that Bret. Good info