SQL Server 6.5 allows you to tune performance for SMP systems, and it allows you to configure remote connection timeouts.
Thread affinity has been introduced into SQL Server to increase and tune performance on SMP systems with four or more processors. The affinity mask configuration option is a bit vector, where each bit maps to a CPU. This allows you to specify which CPUs are used by SQL Server. Because moving the thread structures and thread data between CPUs is minimized, the threads that handle the network interrupts are masked off. Testing shows an increase in throughput of heavy loads when using the affinity mask configuration option to specify on which CPUs SQL Server threads run.
SQL Server now maintains connections to remote servers for a configurable period of time, rather than closing these connections at the end of every remote stored procedure call.