I've read that over four cores performance degrades. I've read that you only need a single core but a high frequency processor and as much ram as you can get. There's a lot of conflicting information out there but not a simple yes it can take advantage of more than one core, or no it can't.
Just to get the ball rolling here, I'll explain what I know and hopefully it is correct.
When purchasing an ArcGIS Server 10.1 license you also purchase the ability to utilize 4 cores - if 4 isn't enough you must purchase additional licensing. Our company is currently going through this decision making process as we're upgrading from 9.2 to 10.1. I cannot give you any information on degradation. I believe Desktop and Catalog are single-core, but that's just from reading the forums here.
Just to get the ball rolling here, I'll explain what I know and hopefully it is correct.
When purchasing an ArcGIS Server 10.1 license you also purchase the ability to utilize 4 cores - if 4 isn't enough you must purchase additional licensing. Our company is currently going through this decision making process as we're upgrading from 9.2 to 10.1. I cannot give you any information on degradation. I believe Desktop and Catalog are single-core, but that's just from reading the forums here.
Thanks for the feedback. We're going from 10 to 10.1 SP1.
I've read several documents about it. And most are similar to this link. ESRI claims that multi-cores are supported but the user community claims that an outright falsehood. Anyone else have time to comment?
Yes, server does take advantage of all the cores available on a machine.
For example, when doing a large scale map cache of we have a machine with 24 cores that runs at 100% utilization across all 24 cores.
Cheers,
Nelson
I have a 24 core machine and set max instances at 25 and ran caching process, but only see a few of the CPUs being using on and off and max CPU usages is between 10-15%. Whats the secret to getting all cores utilized when caching? I know only one SOC process can work on one bundle at a time, but if my zoom level has 84 bundles, it should be working on 24 bundles at a time.
What version of ArcGIS are you running? If you're running 10.0 without any service packs I know that there was a limitation with labelling which caused low processor usage.
In 10.1 that limitation of 1 SOC per bundle is no longer and issues; thus, generating a lot more cache in a smaller period of time.
What version of ArcGIS are you running? If you're running 10.0 without any service packs I know that there was a limitation with labelling which caused low processor usage.
In 10.1 that limitation of 1 SOC per bundle is no longer and issues; thus, generating a lot more cache in a smaller period of time.
I am running ArcServer 10.1 SP1. I have had a ticket in with ESRI regarding CPU utiization issues. Still no luck utilizing 100% CPU. They had me run a test on US Cities sample which were vector layers. Caching that uses 100% CPU, but when using raster data, I get 10-15% utilization.
TESRI claims that multi-cores are supported but the user community claims that an outright falsehood.
ESRI does use multi-threading in certain situations but, in general, they don't because ArcObjects are based on COM STA (not multi-threaded). It seems clear that their overall strategy is to use multiple processes rather than multiple threads. We see this in ArcGIS Server and in the ArcGIS Runtime.
Multiple cores is able to support multiples processes because processes are, in general, independent units of execution.
"...It is easier to support apartment threading in single-threaded apartments because COM provides synchronization on a per-call basis. Supporting free-threading is more difficult because the object must implement synchronization; however, response to clients may be better because synchronization can be implemented for smaller sections of code ..." details: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms680112(v=vs.85).aspx
