Load balancing on Ubuntu Server
- by SabreWolfy
I have Ubuntu 10.04.4 server (32-bit) installed on a headless quad-core machine with 2GB RAM. I'm running a command-line analysis which is analyzing a large amount of data, but which does not require a large amount of RAM. The tool does not provide any multi-threading, so the CPU load is sitting at 1.00 (or sometimes just a little over).
I ran top and pressed 1 to see the load on each of the cores and noticed that "Cpu1" is always running at 100%. I thought that the load would be distributed between the cores, rather than loading one core all the time. I'm sure I've seen this load-balancing behaviour before in Ubuntu or Debian Desktop versions. Why would the Server edition work differently? The analysis will likely take several hours to run, so loading one core at 100% for many hours while the other 3 remain idle is surely not the best approach?