Hello there!

I want to know what distro is best for a dual quad core Intel server, as for now I have centos 5.1 and I have only one CPU showing 98-99% all the time and the others 7 at 0%. Sometimes, there is another one core that shows some 5-6% for a brief period of time, then everything comes back to normal...

I would really like to use this fine machine at full capacity.

If this is not the right forum, please point me to the right direction.

Thanks in advance,
Tony

Any distro with an smp kernel... which is any recent distro.
Check /proc/cpu to see if smp is enabled. Which is your CPU? Do you see any comments about it in dmesg.

Try the cmd
uname -a
if the string 'smp' appears in the result (and it prob will), then your kernel is smp (multi-thr/multi-core) enabled.
You just need to give it more work to do. Note that you are talking about the cpu here, it (throughput of work) won't
necessarily speed up as much as you expect if its waiting on I/O.

2.6.18-8.1.10.el5PAE #1 SMP Thu Sep 13 12:47:24 EDT 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

I do expect some more effort from these CPUs because network traffic is always very little. This server runs an MySQL server and a PHP interface. Serving about 150 clients, the database holds a potential for 1 bilion records (10.000.000 actually), most of the users fetch 1 record at the time as they operate in the database and not generating reports or statistics based on this database.
At a moment we had to split the database in years to speedup queries.

Usually, users place a query in a webpage, the database is interrogated and then some 10-30 kb result is displayed as a web page (the whole page weights 10-30 kb).

There is no timewait on the network (other than the users see there is a pretty long time to display the results). Notwork does never reach its limit.

Previously we had an dual xeon which was fastest than this server - as users report. This server is an HP 370 two quad xeon 5130 cpu with 8 gigs of ram.

There is also a mail server with squirrel mail, with little traffic.


Thanks again
Tony

If you can see all the CPUs (in top or cpuinfo, wherever), they are available for dispatch.
If I wanted to (quickly) test something like this, I'd just arc up a kernel compile with an appropriate -j value; 9 in your case. Simple bash loop will do too - fire up 10 or 12 in the background.

The distribution of Linux is likely to make no difference. Changing to a different 32-bit SMP kernel of Linux would make no difference, and changing to 64 bit would make no difference to the main issue you are asking about (but might help in other ways).

The problem is in the application you are running, not in the Linux distribution.

Maybe this is the wrong forum, but more importantly, you asked the wrong question, so those who might know the answer, might skip the whole thread.

You want to know how to get your MySQL server to make good use of eight cores. That is a very different question from the one you asked. I don't know enough about MySQL to answer your question.

You need an answer to a MySQL question, so maybe you should be asking in a MySQL forum, but definitely "MySQL" belongs in the subject line (along with "quad-core" or "multi-threading" or some such) and "What distro" doesn't belong there.

Maybe "How do I make a MySQL server use all eight cores?"

If you start over in a MySQL forum, be sure include the important info from your two posts in this thread, rather than make people ask again.