Value in multiple cores?

[diskdiddler]

Apologies for bumping a very old thread but does anyone know how the scaling works? At what point is FreeBSD / FreeNAS not utilising extra cores?
I'm looking at low power, mid performance new Intel chips coming out (some kind of Atom derivative) and it uses 8cores (I'd prefer 4, a little faster)
http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2015/2015102901_Some_details_of_Denverton_SoCs_for_microservers.html

That being said an Intel based 14nm microserver could be quite good for power use and what have you. With 8 cores that could be interesting (hopefully the jail code can run on other cores well? I think the jails are the primary issue for my server personally as I run 5 of them)

 

[jgreco]

mod note: evicted from 4 year old thread

 

[mav@]

SMP scalability depends on specific load. ZFS compression and disk encryption scale well to much more then 8 cores. iSCSI and NFS services should also scale well, especially with multiple clients. Handling of CIFS shares is mostly single-threaded. Scalability of plugins depends on type of plugins, but if you have 5 of them and all are active -- they will probably find what to do with CPU cores.