20% CPU utilisation on a 4CPU box

Morning all Informixers... Our hardware is: Windows 2000 Advanced Server (all latest SP's and relevant patches applied) DELL PowerEdge 2650 Servers with 2 x Xeon 2.8ghz multithreaded CPU's (4 virtual) IDS 9.40.TC5 My problem is that whatever we have running on the server, the oninit process only ever reports running at a max of 25% total CPU, so we never get the maximum out of the database engine. I have NUMCPUVPS set to 3 and MULTIPROCESSOR set to 1 which you would expect would indicate to the engine that we have processors to use, but no joy. Is there any way (either through hardware or software mods) that I can instruct either the OS or IDS to use all of the availible processing power, or am I pi$$ing against the wind here? All answers greatly appreciated. S.

Sean Kelsey wrote: > Morning all Informixers... > > Our hardware is: > Windows 2000 Advanced Server (all latest SP's and relevant patches > applied) > DELL PowerEdge 2650 Servers with 2 x Xeon 2.8ghz multithreaded CPU's > (4 virtual) > IDS 9.40.TC5 > > My problem is that whatever we have running on the server, the oninit > process only ever reports running at a max of 25% total CPU, so we > never get the maximum out of the database engine. > > I have NUMCPUVPS set to 3 and MULTIPROCESSOR set to 1 which you would > expect would indicate to the engine that we have processors to use, > but no joy. > > Is there any way (either through hardware or software mods) that I can > instruct either the OS or IDS to use all of the availible processing > power, or am I pi$$ing against the wind here? > > All answers greatly appreciated. > > S. Get out the umbrella. Databases tend to be disk-bound not cpu-bound. Windows will be tunable to a certain degree, but not much. Make sure your pagefile.sys is large enough and split it up if possible across different drives. You should check to make sure you are not paging to disk, stay away from RAID 5, and plan on moving to a Linux or UNIX world. The 2650 is a good little machine but not sure if you should be running a database on it with any appreciable load. If you are getting 25% CPU utilization that little machine must be rockin'. A lot of applications on Windows run faster once moved to Linux on the same machine with an increase your performance by at least 3 to 10x. It can only be the operating systemm that makes the difference all other things being equal. Take a clue, if the software started out on UNIX, then the only reason it's on Windows is to cater to the market, but chances are it was designed for optimal performance on UNIX or Linux. Good luck!

are there Informix processes waiting in the Informix ready Q and not being processed? Or this this Q empty the majority of the time? I think its onstat -g rea If its empty most of the time then the engine and processors are working as hard as they are being asked to and you need to look at your disks, applications etc to see if you an make them generate more work more quickly. If there are jobs waiting in the Q all the time then increase the number of CPU VPs and continue to monitor the Qs. sean.kelsey@moneyline.com (Sean Kelsey) wrote in message news:<a3a829ab.0409080125.7815e24@posting.google.com>... > Morning all Informixers... > > Our hardware is: > Windows 2000 Advanced Server (all latest SP's and relevant patches > applied) > DELL PowerEdge 2650 Servers with 2 x Xeon 2.8ghz multithreaded CPU's > (4 virtual) > IDS 9.40.TC5 > > My problem is that whatever we have running on the server, the oninit > process only ever reports running at a max of 25% total CPU, so we > never get the maximum out of the database engine. > > I have NUMCPUVPS set to 3 and MULTIPROCESSOR set to 1 which you would > expect would indicate to the engine that we have processors to use, > but no joy. > > Is there any way (either through hardware or software mods) that I can > instruct either the OS or IDS to use all of the availible processing > power, or am I pi$$ing against the wind here? > > All answers greatly appreciated. > > S.