In terms of the Sybase Performance and Tuning Guide the following may
occur:

"When engine utilization is extremely high, the housekeeper process
writes
few or no pages out to disk (since it runs only during idle CPU
cycles.)
This means that a checkpoint finds many pages that need to be written
to
disk, and the checkpoint process, a large batch job, or a database
dump is
likely to send CPU usage to 100% for a period of time, causing a
perceptible dip in response time."

also

"In an environment where Adaptive Server is serving a large number of
users, performance is usually fairly evenly distributed across
engines.
However, when there are more engines than tasks, you may see some
engines with a large percentage of utilization, and other engines may
be
idle"

We appear to have this issue as we have 4 engines (and processors)
with at times 1 engine at 100% for a period of time and the other 3 at
0% (or close to), specifically when there is only one session open and
running on the box.
Our report seems to stop for an unacceptable period of time only to
continue at normal speed.

Is there any way to alleviate this scenario?
e.g. Get the housekeeper process to run on one of the other engines

Thanks in advance