Recently, a hosting client of ours has been looking at getting additional capacity for their site. In particular, they have many dynamic pages served by Apache with mod_perl. We have started offering systems with a pair of quad core CPUs (8 total cores), and proposed one of these for their consideration.

The client found a benchmark showing that Apache couldn't make use of any more than 4 CPUs in a single system. I looked at this benchmark and found that it had many problems including, most notably, that it was for Apache running on Windows, were this client is using Linux.

Lots of press over the last 6 months has been speculating that software wasn't ready for the quad core CPUs and beyond. So, I spent one of my days off setting up and running some test of Apache running on up to 8 cores. I've created an article which tries to answer the question: Does Apache scale to running on 8-core systems?
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