How does Iguana use multiple cores?
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This is question which comes up often when clients are figuring out what servers to buy. Iguana does make some use of threads. These components run on their own threads:
- Each translator instance.
- To/From Legacy Database components.
- To/From File components.
So more cores means that Iguana will achieve some parallelization with the additional cores. However the main thread in Iguana is responsible for co-ordinating messaging between the threads so it can become a bottleneck in some circumstances. One possible way to get more use of the CPU resources on such a machine is to consider running more than one Iguana instance on such a machine.
Server optimization will vary greatly depending on the nature of the interfaces and type of data you are running through the machine.
The monitoring tool I mentioned before is helpful in measuring the actual performance of an Iguana instance to get a feel for what the bottlenecks are. In practice we’ve found that Iguana is rarely CPU bound – it more important to spend money on high quality discs to reduce the amount of contention one sees there.