This is a 740 (8205-E6B), and it has 16 physical processors. The partition with the problem has 6 logical CPUs and SMT 4. It's got an entitlement of 4, but is uncapped, so it should be able to potentially access up to 6 physical processors, since there are more than that in the box, right? I do have nmon every day for every partition except for the VIO servers. The partition where I can build the package faster is on this same physical box, with an entitlement of 1, 4 logical processors, and SMT 4. Last night I changed the ulimits for the jde user on the slow box to match what's on the fast one, and that's made a difference, but it's still over four times slower. Here's the lparstat info for the slow partition:
Type : Shared-SMT-4
Mode : Uncapped
Entitled Capacity : 4.00
Partition Group-ID : 32773
Shared Pool ID : 0
Online Virtual CPUs : 6
Maximum Virtual CPUs : 8
Minimum Virtual CPUs : 2
Online Memory : 57344 MB
Maximum Memory : 81920 MB
Minimum Memory : 16384 MB
Variable Capacity Weight : 128
Minimum Capacity : 0.20
Maximum Capacity : 5.00
Capacity Increment : 0.01
Maximum Physical CPUs in system : 16
Active Physical CPUs in system : 16
Active CPUs in Pool : 16
Shared Physical CPUs in system : 16
Maximum Capacity of Pool : 1600
Entitled Capacity of Pool : 1380
Unallocated Capacity : 0.00
Physical CPU Percentage : 66.67%
Unallocated Weight : 0
Memory Mode : Dedicated
Total I/O Memory Entitlement : -
Variable Memory Capacity Weight : -
Memory Pool ID : -
Physical Memory in the Pool : -
Hypervisor Page Size : -
Unallocated Variable Memory Capacity Weight: -
Unallocated I/O Memory entitlement : -
Memory Group ID of LPAR : -
Desired Virtual CPUs : 6
Desired Memory : 57344 MB
Desired Variable Capacity Weight : 128
Desired Capacity : 4.00
Target Memory Expansion Factor : -
Target Memory Expansion Size : -
Power Saving Mode : Disabled
Sub Processor Mode : -
And the /etc/security/limits values for the user (which are now the same on both):
fsize = -1
core = 2097151
cpu = -1
data = -1
rss = -1
stack_hard = -1
stack = -1
nofiles = 128000