Control CPU usage pxplus.exe or switch to another CPU-Core

[rlimbeck]

Hi All,

I am wondering if somebody knows how to influence the % of CPU time when running a pxplus.exe on a Windows 2012 R2 server with 4 cores. When running a long and heavy duty process with many reads & writes, you normally want as much power as available to get the job done as quickly as possible. When doing so I notice an almost constant 25% load of the CPU due to the 4 cores.

When starting simultaneously a new pxplus.exe (version 12.50 btw) it will almost get no CPU-time. PxPlus will not use another core and must "wait" on the initial process to finish. When multiple customers start a large job, the whole server might get clogged up and you even might run out of licenses.

So, for now, the only thing I can think of is setting the priority to 'below normal' or even to 'low' in the Windows TaskManager. This results in having at least some percentages free for other pxplus-commands.

Any idea how to fix this issue?

[Mike King]

When running PxPlus processes, each process can use use up to one "core" worth of CPU.  This is because the applications are generally written single threaded.  In order to take advantage of multiple cores you need to run multiple PxPlus processes.  On a four core system you would have to be running four CPU intensive processes in order to get to 100% system load.

Internally PxPlus itself does have some ability to use multiple threads and as such will use multiple cores when doing tasks such as network IO or database processing, but these tasks rarely consume much in the way of CPU time.  Physical disc IO is also done by the OS and will often be done in the other cores.

You should however be able to run multiple sessions on the system without any problems even when running a CPU intensive process.  If you cannot, it generally is due to application design such as locking files or other resources in one process that the other processes require access to.

[Bruno Biancucci]

A couple of suggestions to help with processing speed when dealing with programs that deal with lots of disk IO.  For temporary files where I need to constantly read a file (or write small output), I like to use memory file(s) (*memory*).  On the hardware side, we've installed SSD drives where there is a lot of disk IO - we've found a factor of 10 times faster processing than systems that use SATA hard drives.  In most cases the SSD drive is temporary storage.