Measuring Multiprocessor System Activity

Upgrading or Adding Processors

If you cannot improve the efficiency of your SMP configuration through the preceding steps, you might want to add or upgrade system processors. When doing so, choose processors with a large secondary (L2) cache. File server applications, Web servers, and databases are a few examples of the many workloads that benefit from a large processor cache. A large processor cache, ranging from 512K to 4MB or larger, is recommended to improve performance on active servers running Web servers or other connection-intensive operations.