On Thu, 2010-01-28 at 22:45 +0000, Mike Bresnahan wrote:
> I can understand that I will not get as much performance out of a EC2 instance
> as a dedicated server, but I don't understand why top(1) is showing 50% CPU
> utilization.
One possible cause is lock contention, but I don't know if that explains
your problem. Perhaps there's something about the handling of shared
memory or semaphores on EC2 that makes it slow enough that it's causing
lock contention.
You could try testing on a xen instance and see if you have the same
problem.
Regards,
Jeff Davis