Quad Core & cPanel?

[WireNine]

How well does cpanel utilize the power of a quad core processor? I've read that many control panels/OS do not fully utilize the full cpu power of the new core processors and it's kind of useless purchase something so powerful yet not be able to fully use up all the cores

It might sound stupid, but I did read it somewhere and I would just like cpanel community opinion

[Spiral]

This is more a factor of your operating system than anything else

[cPanelDavidG]

The following is under the assumption that the Operating System has no problems recognizing and properly utilizing a quad core or quad core hyper threaded processor. Also keep in mind I'm trying to avoid making this discussion excessively technical so that everyone can understand it.

Multi-core systems do work far better than single-core systems in server environments. Keep in mind, you will always have multiple pieces of software wanting time on the CPU (CPU time) and the more cores you have, the more opportunities server software will have to actually get time on the CPU and thus everything will run faster.

So even though an application such as cPanel and WHM may theoretically be single-threaded (meaning intended to run only on a single processor, not taking advantage of multiple processors), the applications it relies on such as Exim and Apache will also be trying to get CPU time. Also keeping in mind that a typical server may have dozens of "copies" of Apache running simultaneously serving multiple visitors - you will have many applications desiring CPU time. So the more cores you have, the faster the server will process requests. Also, the more cores you have, the less you have to worry about a single application hogging the entire CPU.

While we here at cPanel do not offer hardware advice, it is generally accepted that the more cores you have at this point, the better off you will be. Don't think that extra CPU power will go to waste because with more CPU resources available, you can afford to do things you might not be able to consider doing on a single-core system.

[WireNine]

The following is under the assumption that the Operating System has no problems recognizing and properly utilizing a quad core or quad core hyper threaded processor. Also keep in mind I'm trying to avoid making this discussion excessively technical so that everyone can understand it.

Multi-core systems do work far better than single-core systems in server environments. Keep in mind, you will always have multiple pieces of software wanting time on the CPU (CPU time) and the more cores you have, the more opportunities server software will have to actually get time on the CPU and thus everything will run faster.

So even though an application such as cPanel and WHM may theoretically be single-threaded (meaning intended to run only on a single processor, not taking advantage of multiple processors), the applications it relies on such as Exim and Apache will also be trying to get CPU time. Also keeping in mind that a typical server may have dozens of "copies" of Apache running simultaneously serving multiple visitors - you will have many applications desiring CPU time. So the more cores you have, the faster the server will process requests. Also, the more cores you have, the less you have to worry about a single application hogging the entire CPU.

While we here at cPanel do not offer hardware advice, it is generally accepted that the more cores you have at this point, the better off you will be. Don't think that extra CPU power will go to waste because with more CPU resources available, you can afford to do things you might not be able to consider doing on a single-core system.

Would you recommend it for shared hosting environment?

[cPanelDavidG]

Would you recommend it for shared hosting environment?

Absolutely. Just considering it from the perspective of users running PHP and PERL scripts, something has to execute those scripts and the more cores you have available for applications to access in order to execute those scripts, the less sluggish the overall server will be.