ML350e G8 Much slower than ML350 G5 it replaced

[waaronb]

I think the only way to know for sure is to check with performance monitor on the physical server itself.

I don't remember if Windows still handles system interrupts with just the first core. If there's a lot of disk thrashing that could account for it. Check out "Process Explorer" from Sysinternals or just the Windows task manager and see if the CPU usage is from a particular program or from interrupt handling.

I'm thinking that in newer versions of Windows, it can handle interrupts on multiple CPUs, smartly, so I don't know if that would explain it, but at least using one of those tools you can see exactly what process is munching away on CPU cycles. If the interrupts are all being caused by the same subsystem, then I guess it would tend to keep the interrupts on the same core. Whenever I've seen high interrupt usage, it's caused by something doing disk thrashing, like the stupid Windows Media Library thing scanning all my videos and songs.

It does seem odd that it's only using 100% of one core. Unless it's "sticky" (affinity) to a particular core, even if it's not a multi-threading app the OS would still spread the load over all the CPU's more or less equally.

For instance, VCRM (version control repository manager) is non-threading and when it's doing catalog validation it will use 100% of a single thread, but on a multi-core system the OS still spreads that out over all the cores. If you have 4 cores, the overall usage is 25% and the graphs for individual cores will show peaks and valleys as the OS slices up the load.