Will mariadb use mutliple cores at all? Good day.  We have an 8 core server for mariadb 10.1 on Centos 7. IT's a production database as well as a replication master. I am not sure if it's using more than one of the cores.  

We also have a one-core virtual server acting as a slave. 

Searching on this tells me that most queries are about using more than one core per query, which are repeatedly answered with NO, that's not possible.  I get that. 

I just want to know if multiple queries can be apportioned out to multiple cores, whether configuration settings are required to do this, and how to tell if it's working. 

I also need to know whether slave throughput could be improved by adding cores.  

Thanks,

Ed Greenberg
The short answer is yes. It will use a thread per connection by default which you can delegate queries to concurrently, which will utilize multiple cores on the operating system level.

Slave throughput can be dramatically improved by adding cores using parallel replication which is not enabled by default. https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/parallel-replication/