Overview

While facing high CPU usage for Virtual Exinda with WAN memory Acceleration, the configuration can be changed in order to achieve maximum balanced performance. When the multi-core CPUs are being used in Esxi 6.5 environment, the default settings for using Processor affinity are in place. This might cause some CPUs to be very highly utilized but others staying idle.

Such "Thread affinity" parameter can be turned off to spread the load on all available cores.

Solution

1. Login to Exinda via SSH using Putty (Windows) or Terminal (Mac/Linux) app.
2. Enter the Exinda shell by executing the following commands:
   

       en
       _shell

   Note: If you get asked for a License key, that means that you need to Activate the Restricted Commands License, open a Support Ticket and ask them to activate it.

3. Remount the filesystem as read-write and enable no_thread_affinity parameter:
   

       remountrw
       echo "no_thread_affinity=true" > /etc/tcpad.conf

   
4. Reboot the Exinda afterward:
   

       reboot

5. Wait till Exinda reboots and becomes accessible again.

Testing

When the Traffic is being generated measure the performance using the below commands:

  en
  _shell
  sar -P ALL 420 1000

Note: it will take approx. 7 minutes to run. Check the "%idle" column in the output. This should be showing lower values than before.