[KLUG Members] Load distribution on SMP system

[Komal]

Hi All,

I just noticed this on a server I administer:

 04:37:09  up 196 days, 19:03,  3 users,  load average: 1.02, 1.03,
1.00
167 processes: 165 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  cpu    user    nice  system    irq  softirq  iowait
idle
           total   25.3%    0.0%    0.2%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%
74.3%
           cpu00    0.9%    0.0%    0.0%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%
99.0%
           cpu01    0.9%    0.0%    0.9%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%
98.0%
           cpu02    0.0%    0.0%    0.0%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%
100.0%
           cpu03  100.0%    0.0%    0.0%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%
0.0%
Mem:  2055492k av, 1948660k used,  106832k free,       0k shrd,
350376k buff
                   1124124k actv,  278412k in_d,   27620k in_c
Swap: 2097096k av,   11704k used, 2085392k free
841472k cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU
COMMAND
  476 root      25   0  252M 252M  9312 R    25.1 12.5 712:02   3 java

(Please view in a fixed width font)

As you can see, the java process is taking up 100% of one of the
available CPUs, while leaving the other three almost completely idle.
Why?

I can see 58 Java threads running (ps xam | grep [j]ava | wc -l).

Yes, the JVM is running in server mode - /usr/local/java/bin/java
-server <other stuff>

RHEL3 U4, Sun JVM 1.4.2_05. The server is an HP DL360 G4 with dual
Xeon 3.2GHz CPUs.

TIA,

Komal