I have an MSDP media server (Win Srvr 2008 R2 SP1) that has not had any tuning applied.
It is an HP DL180 G6 with 64 GB RAM and two Xeon E5620 CPUs, which yeilds 8 cores of 2.4 GHz. Local disk is RAID-1 of 2 x 600 GB SAS-I (3.0 Gb/s) at 15k rpm, on HP P410 controller with 512 MB battery write cache, 25% read / 75% write. C: for O/S and D: for programs on these two spindles.
E:\ 2.0 TB on SAN FC HP 3PAR storage for MSDP database,
F:\ 60.0 TB on SAN FC NexSAN SATAbeast storage for MSDP data.
(FYI - NIC is 4 x 1 Gb/s of 802.3ad bonded - bond total is 25% to 30% busy - one NIC is >70% busy)
Under backup load I see one CPU core pretty much fixed at 80% to 90% load, and the other 7 cores all at never less than 15% each and never more than 20% each.
Q1) Does this seem normal - i.e. one very busy core, and seven not doing very much ?
Q2) spoold takes 4% to 5% of total CPU resource, and we know that each core is 12.5% of total - so spoold actually consumes about 1/3 to 1/2 of a core - so why is one core pretty much fixed at 80% usage?
FYI - This article touches on NUMA:
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/tuning-windows-2003-and-2008-symantec-netbackup
Q3) Has anyone actually applied the kernel thread tuning described in this article ?
Q4) Was there actually any measurable benefit from applying the kernel thread tuning ?
Thanks.