Software :: How Force Multiple Processes To Run On Separate Processors

when I start my application it creates a message queue and forks a process. The child process reads multicast packets from the network and writes to message queue. The parent process reads packets from message queue and compares source ip and sequence number (it is part of payload) with last 64K packets received to see if it has received a duplicate packet. I am using message queue as a buffer because I do not want child process to drop any packets while it is comparing it with previously received packets. The message queue is large enough to contain 64K packets. To compare the old packets I am using array of structures as circular buffer. During a spike I may receive 100 - 120 packets per milli second.

When I run my application, the parent process keeps up with the child process, I can see that with "ipcs -q". After about 30 seconds it cannot keep up and the size of message queue keeps increasing until it is full. When I run "top" I can see that one CPU/core is hundred percent busy while other 7 cores are idle. It seems that both processes are running on same core and the child process gets interrupts everytime there is a packet on the net and starves the parent process.I am running RHEL 5. The system has 24GB memory and my application is the only application running on it. It is a HP G6 server.