64 Bit SQL Server 2005 Process Is Only Utilizing One Processor Whereas In 32 Bit Environ. Uses Multiple Processors

Hello all,

We've had a problem for a few months now that has completely stumped us. We are running a heavily cursored massive data manipulation process on a 32 bit SQL Server instance running on a virtual machine, running ontop of VMWare, with the following specs

Processors: 2x2674MHz processors
Memory: 4GB
RAID 10 disk config

When we run our process on this machine, in total it runs in 30 hours.

When this process is run on another 32 bit server with the following specs

Processors: 8x3658MHx processors
Memory: 8 GB
SAN w/ RAID 5 disk config

It runs 25% slower

But here is the real kicker. When this process is run on a 64 bit server with the following specs

Processors: 8x3658MHz processors
Memory: 8 GB
SAN w/ RAID 5 disk config

It runs 75% slower.

This process consists solely of stored procedures written in TSQL. The weird thing is that on our smaller server, the CPUs' % utilization are evenly balanced (at 20-30%) when this large data manipulation process is running. However on the bigger servers, SQL Server latches onto a single processor and doesn't load balance across other processors. Such that what we're seeing is that only one processor out of the eight will be utilized and it will be throttled at 90% while the other 7 are at zero.

The default configuration settings in all three places.

Has anyone ever seen any behavior like this, where only one processor gets used by SQL Server during processing? Granted our processes are single threaded b/c they are using cursors but, it seems that the single thread shouldn't be restricted to one processor.

Any thoughts?