100% cpu utilization

My server program seems to cap out at 50% CPU usage. I'm not sure if it's a linux thing or a MySQL thing. is there any way to force it to use more of the CPU? I have two dell poweredge 6850's with four dual core xeons, and I'm seeing that no matter what I do, I can't get the CPU usage to get above 50%. Is it possible that MySQL has some sort of limit on its CPU usage? perhaps I need to change a system setting to allow a user to use more than 50% of the CPU.

this is killing performance on my production servers, so any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance.

Perhaps you have limited the parallel threads to 4? That would explain why you only get 50% usage - half of your hardware threads would be unused.

Or it may simply be that you've hit an I/O bottleneck. Databases are generally I/O-bound, so all that computing power might simply go to waste because the CPUs are waiting for the hard disk.

You'll have to do some profiling.

Originally Posted by CornedBee

Perhaps you have limited the parallel threads to 4? That would explain why you only get 50% usage - half of your hardware threads would be unused.

where would I check for the parallel threads setting?

Originally Posted by CornedBee

Or it may simply be that you've hit an I/O bottleneck. Databases are generally I/O-bound, so all that computing power might simply go to waste because the CPUs are waiting for the hard disk.

You'll have to do some profiling.

the servers have 16GB of RAM, and the whole database is less than 100MB. I'll admit that some of my queries are probably not the most efficient in the world, but with that much memory, it should be no problem to cache the entire database and run from memory, updating the disk file periodically.

Well, you could run top and set it to display the CPU loads individually. Man top to find out how. That would be the first step.

I did that, and it was quite enlightening, but also, I optimized a few of my sql queries, which made significant improvements to performance. we'll see what happens this afternoon at our normal peak usage time.

I found this page randomly, searching for an articla by Raymond Chen on CPU usage.

Surely not...?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/ar...02/499389.aspx

Originally Posted by Anonymous17

I found this page randomly, searching for an articla by Raymond Chen on CPU usage.

Surely not...?
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/ar...02/499389.aspx

I'm not sure what you are saying "Surely not" about?

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Mats