A systems administrator is troubleshooting a performance issue with a critical, multi-threaded database application running on a 32-core server. Users report that complex queries are taking much longer than usual to complete. The administrator observes that overall CPU utilization is below 20%, but two specific CPU cores are constantly at 100% utilization whenever the application is running a task. Other applications on the server are performing normally. What is the MOST likely cause of this performance bottleneck?
A memory leak within the application is consuming system resources.
The server's CPU is thermal throttling due to a cooling failure.
An incompatible device driver was recently installed on the server.
The application's CPU affinity has been improperly configured.
The correct answer is that the application's CPU affinity has been improperly configured. CPU affinity, or processor pinning, is a setting that restricts a process to run on specific CPU cores. In this scenario, the multi-threaded database application, which is designed to use multiple cores, is being forced to run on only two cores. This causes those two cores to become saturated at 100% utilization, creating a bottleneck, while the other 30 cores remain underutilized. This directly matches the symptoms described.
A memory leak would manifest as continually increasing RAM usage, eventually leading to system-wide sluggishness or crashes, not high utilization isolated to specific CPU cores.
CPU thermal throttling is a protective measure where the CPU slows itself down to prevent overheating. This would typically affect the performance of all cores, not cause a few to run at 100% while others are idle.
An incompatible device driver is more likely to cause system instability, errors, or crashes (like a Blue Screen of Death) rather than this specific CPU utilization pattern.