What causes very unequal CPU usage?

[mauricevo]

Is it ever normal for the CPU performance as displayed in the performance tab of the task manager to be very unequal?

After a time, the CPU usage graph in the performance tab of the task manager becomes skewed. The CPU in the left graph has a baseline of about 40%, and the baseline for the one on the right is near 0%. Once this happens, even if I quit the main program (Retrospect), the shifted difference between the two CPUs remains. The graph of right CPU does show usage (fluctuations in the graph), so it's not as if the second CPU is not being utilized at all.

This is happening on an Arima HDAMA board with dual 248 Opterons and 2 GB RAM using default BIOS settings. The OS is Windows Server 2003 standard edition (32-bit). The major program running is Dantz Retrospect.

 

[NortonES2]

Probably depends on the multi-threading capabilities of the software, though I don't know about Dantz Retrospect. If the software doesn't support multi-threading then it will only use 1 CPU.

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If it doesn't leak oil it must be empty!!

 

[mauricevo]

I think it would take some effort get a program to manually place more threads on one CPU than the other, and how would it continue to do that after the program has been quit?

Also, I don't think this behavior occurs on the 32-bit Dell dual Xeon, which is also running W2K3.