We experience the same problem. I believe the problem has more to do with the 
kernel CPU scheduler than anything else. If you figure put a reliable way to 
spread the load, I'd like to hear it. 

Clifton King
Development
[email protected]
512-940-7744

Sent from my phone. 

On May 31, 2011, at 7:20 AM, Nate Clark <[email protected]> wrote:

> Lawrence,
> 
> I've suspected that it may be a monitoring problem and not a Unicorn
> problem, but I'm not yet convinced either way. Our monitoring via
> collectd is done through Rightscale. They have a lot of experience
> with EC2, so I'd assume that it is monitoring properly. Also, our
> other services (mysql, for example) are showing activity on multiple
> cores under load, so that leads me to believe that the monitoring is
> working in at least some cases.
> 
> I wasn't aware of the Cloudwatch service until now, that looks
> interesting ... I'll check it out.
> 
> Anyone else experience a problem like this?
> 
> Nate
> 
> On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 8:10 PM, Lawrence Pit <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Hi Nate,
>>> 
>>> We've been watching the CPU
>>> graphs from collectd data when the website is under load, and only
>>> cpu-0 shows any activity ... the others seem to be idle, or minimally
>>> used by other services.
>> 
>> I don't think you can rely on the numbers collectd (nor top) gives you when
>> measuring from within the hypervisor powering your EC2 instance. The only
>> reliable source of CPU utilization is Cloudwatch, as that measures outside
>> your instances.
>> 
>> I've used an array of xlarge instances myself, each running 17 unicorn
>> workers serving a rails app, consuming 4GB, leaving 3GB, no swap. Worked
>> well for us under high load. It couldn't have handled that if all 17 unicorn
>> workers would've been served by 1 of those 8 virtual cores.
>> 
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Lawrence
>> 
>> 
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