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myVirtualHell
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Contributor

help diagnosing processor queue length

I work in an enterprise environment and our monitoring tool is kicking

out tons of tickets on a few servers HighCPUAlert....blah blah.

Upon

inspection I find the CPU usage is quite low and is rarely even

spiking. However, I do find in perfmon that the "System > Processor Queue

Length" is very high and this is tied to our monitoring of the CPU. When I say very high I mean in the 20-100 range with 7 day averages around 25. It should be in the 1-3 range.

This is a windows 2008 EE 64-bit virtual server riding on a ESX3.5 host with 1 CPU allocated. It is running Apache. However, I am also seeing this on win2k3 running IIS with 1 vCPU.

I am trying to wrap my head around this and any help would be appreciated. *The

million dollar question is: How can I determine what application is

causing the thread backup in the CPU and what can I do to resolve it?*

Or, perhaps this is just a mis-read based on a virtual environment?? If that is the case then I still need to be able to document it to convince management that the monitoring needs to be adjusted.

I

have been unable to determine a means for diagnosing this without

scheduling downtime for the server and stopping various processes. I

see in process explorer that Apache launches 254 threads for many of

its httpd.exe processes, but those are using zero cycles and very

little CPU. Furthermore, at least one of the other servers displaying

this behavior is NOT running Apache.

I am happy to post

additional details and/or reports, but I thought I would see what info

would be useful before littering the post with non-useful information.

I appreciate your help as I am a bit under the gun to locate an answer to this issue.

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myVirtualHell
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based on the lack of available information on this issue, I didn't really expect much response...but come on, anybody want to take a crack at it? I remember seeing somewhere that there is some additional piece of esx 3.5 that is not enabled by default that may help synchronize timing between vm and host...anyone know what that is?

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