CPU Balancing

Chris redhat-list at dotcomdesigners.com
Tue Sep 14 19:07:24 UTC 2004


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Zambrano Teran, David" <dzambrano at royal-holiday.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 11:58 AM
Subject: CPU Balancing


> Ehlo everyone,
> I have a Dell Server with 2 Xeon CPU's running RH AS 3.0 and when I go
> to top I see 4 cpu's, while I know this is caused by the Hyper threading
> technology, I don't know why the processes are assigned to only one cpu
> at the time.
> Is it possible to a process to use all cpu power available to finish its
> task faster?

Only if the applications themselves are hyperthreading aware and/or written 
in a way that know how to handle multiple processors.  Most apps are not. 
The advantage you still get is that the OS itself will try to split the load 
between the two CPUs (and virtual CPUs in hyperthreading cases).

With Intel finally abandoning the Ghz race and now claiming it's all about 
multi-core, multi-threading, etc, you should see more developers writing 
their apps and compiling them with hyperthreading and SMP in mind.

Chris 






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