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Programs not using all the available CPU power

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Sometimes when I am using a program which definetly supports multiple cores and can make use of them it doesn't use the the whole processing power that is available.

I was using VMware Workstation and exporting a VM to OVF and here is my utilization:

The reason for using the CPU is because Workstation is compressing the VM but why is it not using more of the CPU?
 

Solaris17

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Because not all actions can be multi threaded, and not all actions run enough new tasks or sequences internally to need more CPU power.
 

Aquinus

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There is this thing called locking in most multi-threaded applications where a thread must wait for another thread to give up access to some kind of shared resource to prevent unpredictable behavior so, more often than not, even if you have 2 or even 20 threads, you might not see more than 2 full threads worth of compute being used. That's just how the world works as not every workload can be made to be purely parallel.
 
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