Thanks for all of the suggestions. To recap:
1. I'm not sure why my claim that running jobs in several terminal windows will "automatically" be distributed to the next least used core (and it will run at 100% until the job is done. I have be doing this for years w/o ANY special coding or using any task managers or scheduler. Not only does (or did) work on SL, but I use this same strategy on an an Ubuntu installation (a virtual Ubuntu running on a Windows machine, to boot!). 2. I am more than willing to look into task managers/schedulers, but I shouldn't need to go down that road. 3. The fact that the tar extraction process is so slow as to be effectively useless, suggest something of a larger problem. 4. These problems exist on 3 machines which are IDENTICAL in every respect and the hardware is less than 1 year old. 5. I will investigate possible BIOS issues; I don't thing dirty power is an issue as the machines are on UPS which provides some degree of power conditioning. And, these units have been in place (about 6 months old) and were in place when things were running "correctly". 6. The only "hopeful" aspect in this very confusing, annoying and frustrating situation is that the behavior is identical on all 3 machines. I welcome other suggestions for troubleshooting. I am hoping I can post a solution to this dilemma in the near future-- my work has come to a screeching halt. Regards, Wil On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 11:59 AM, zxq9 <[email protected]> wrote: > On 04/06/2012 03:18 AM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: > >> On 5 April 2012 10:47, Wil Irwin<[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Hi- >>> >>> I am totally stumped and at a complete loss on this one. >>> >>> In an 'old school' manner (a.k.a poor man's grid engine), it is a common >>> practice (at least for me) to open multiple terminal windows on a >>> mullti-core machine. Submitting a job in each terminal window will send >>> it >>> to a core which is not being used. On this particular set of machines I >>> have >>> been doing this for about 2 years. >>> >> >> To be honest I have no idea why it worked before. Setting a process to >> a certain core takes definitive coding to say "x will have affinity to >> CPU y" or using a program like taskset to set the affinity. >> >> I would try the following: >> 1) man taskset >> 2) see if taskset works on your system. >> >> Then see if it works. If it doesn't then I would assume that the CPU >> or some other hardware in the box is having issues and not allowing >> processes on the other cores for some reason. >> > > In addition to the excellent advice here, I've seen a very similar problem > before with some faulty BIOS code telling the system to kick in to a very > conservative processing mode when certain voltage indicators were met. This > came out of the blue and was extremely frustrating to troubleshoot because > it like what you're seeing but was a hardware issue born of a special > combination of dirty power input, a slowly fading PSU and a cranky > mainboard. > > The odds of that ever happening again anywhere are probably pretty low, > especially with server type boards, but its worth considering. > > Good luck finding your solution. That must be annoying. > > -z >
