4 CPU Utilization Imbalance

[logos1]

Got a strange thing happening, any comments are appreciated:

1) 4 CPU server
2) CPU's 0 & 2 are usually below 15% or so utilization (Perfmon, Task Manager)
3) CPU's 1 & 3 are usually nearly maxed out above 90%
4) Two SQL threads of over 80 threads in Perfmon show almost constant 90% Processor Time
5) Processor affinity in Server Properties is checked to use all four processors
6) Hyper-threading is not enabled
7) SQL Server priority is checked on HIGH
8) Dedicated SQL Server

Anybody know how to track down what those specific threads are executing? Any ideas, anybody? Thanks for the help!

Steve

[skhanal]

Have you set max degree of parallelism
to non-default (may be 2).

Are you running any query which uses hint MAXDOP?

To find out which thread is consuming CPU, in system monitor go to report view and add %Processor Time and Thread ID counters of Thread object for all threads running in the server.

Get the thread id of the thread with highest %processor time. If it is a sql server thread,

select * from sysprocesses where kpid = <thread id from system monitor>

This is the culprit process for you, try to investigate what it is doing.

[logos1]

Shailesh, using the thread ID in Perfmon and querying sysprocesses did the trick. Processor utilization is back to normal. That was a tremendous amount of help for us; thanks a bunch!

Steve