“Engine Busy Utilization” reports the percentage of time the Adaptive Server Kernel is busy executing tasks on each Adaptive Server engine (rather than time spent idle). The summary row gives the total and the average active time for all engines combined.
The values reported here may differ from the CPU usage values reported by operating system tools. When Adaptive Server has no tasks to process, it enters a loop that regularly checks for network I/O, completed disk I/Os, and tasks in the run queue.
Operating system commands to check CPU activity may show high usage for a Adaptive Server engine because they are measuring the looping activity, while “Engine Busy Utilization” does not include time spent looping—it is considered idle time.
One measurement that cannot be made from inside Adaptive Server is the percentage of time that Adaptive Server had control of the CPU vs. the time the CPU was in use by the operating system. Check your operating system documentation for the correct commands.
If you want to reduce the time that Adaptive Server spends checking for I/O while idle, you can lower the sp_configure parameter runnable process search count. This parameter specifies the number of times a Adaptive Server engine loops looking for a runnable task before yielding the CPU.
For more information, see the System Administration Guide.
“Engine Busy Utilization” measures how busy Adaptive Server engines were during the CPU time they were given. If the engine is available to Adaptive Server for 80% of a 10-minute sample interval, and “Engine Busy Utilization” was 90%, it means that Adaptive Server was busy for 7 minutes and 12 seconds and was idle for 48 seconds.
This category can help you decide whether there are too many or too few Adaptive Server engines. Adaptive Server’s high scalability is due to tunable mechanisms that avoid resource contention.
By checking sp_sysmon output for problems and tuning to alleviate contention, response time can remain high even at “Engine Busy” values in the 80 to 90% range. If values are consistently very high (more than 90%), it is likely that response time and throughput could benefit from an additional engine.
The “Engine Busy Utilization” values are averages over the sample interval, so very high averages indicate that engines may be 100% busy during part of the interval.
When engine utilization is extremely high, the housekeeper process writes few or no pages out to disk (since it runs only during idle CPU cycles.) This means that a checkpoint finds many pages that need to be written to disk, and the checkpoint process, a large batch job, or a database dump is likely to send CPU usage to 100% for a period of time, causing a perceptible dip in response time.
If the “Engine Busy Utilization” percentages are consistently high, and you want to improve response time and throughput by adding Adaptive Server engines, check for increased resource contention in other areas after adding each engine.
In an environment where Adaptive Server is serving a large number of users, performance is usually fairly evenly distributed across engines. However, when there are more engines than tasks, you may see some engines with a large percentage of utilization, and other engines may be idle. On a server with a single task running a query, for example, you may see output like this:
Engine Busy Utilization
Engine 0 97.2 %
Engine 1 0.0 %
Engine 2 0.0 %
Engine 3 0.0 %
Engine 4 0.0 %
Engine 5 0.0 %
----------- --------------- ----------------
Summary Total 97.2 % Average 16.2 %
In an SMP environment, tasks have soft affinity to engines. Without other activity (such as lock contention) that could cause this task to be placed in the global run cue, the task continues to run on the same engine.
