The home page of the linode site states quad core xen instances but it looks like linodes are only single core. Can someone explain this please. We need to farm off some tasks like Java garbage collection to sepatare CPU's but this looks as if it is not possible.[/b]

What kernel are you running? I get 4 cores...

josh@newark1:~$ uname -r
2.6.38.3-linode32
josh@newark1:~$ grep processor /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l
4
josh@newark1:~$ 

Each host machine has two four-core Xeons for a total of eight cores. Each Linode has access to four of those cores.

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/ Peter

run the command

cat /proc/cpuinfo

which shows information on each core. You can also run the program

top

and press the number 1 - that shows individual core load like this:

top - 09:09:01 up 6:07, 7 users, load average: 5.20, 4.98, 5.09
Tasks: 165 total, 7 running, 158 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu0 : 0.3%us, 0.3%sy, 94.6%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 4.4%st
Cpu1 : 0.9%us, 0.6%sy, 91.2%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 7.2%st
Cpu2 : 0.3%us, 0.6%sy, 91.9%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 7.2%st
Cpu3 : 0.0%us, 0.2%sy, 72.5%ni, 24.2%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 3.1%st


James

Make sure your JVM is using a multithreaded garbage collector. By default it is likely using a stop-the-world GC.

Thanks folks. Much appreciated

Very impressed with the linode offering!