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How many cores can a single worker process typically handle before performance becomes impacted?

In performance testing we are currently running into capacity limits on the WFE servers generating a high volume of requests/postbacks from InfoPath forms. We increased the CPU count on each of the 2 WFEs from 8 cores to 12 cores and increased max threads and connections of ASP.NET as such, and were able to gain an additional 20-30% capacity before CPUs again started hitting 100% utilization and requests starting to queue up, response times increasing, and application restarts occurring.

Before looking to scale out more WFEs, we want to scale up existing ones as much as possible first. We are concerned that the single application and worker process will stop scaling at higher core counters. Should we look to web gardening to increase maximum throughput (BLOB caching will be disabled) of the web application/pool?

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There are no defined limits as these processes are inherently multi-threaded and can use up to the virtual address space of the edition of Windows that you're using. Web gardens are unsupported.

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  • Can you provide a link to where Microsoft documentation that states this is unsupported? I've only ever seen some posts from non-Microsoft people making these claims. Sure web gardens can cause issues with session states if the website is not properly configured or cause resource blocking on things such as blob cache. But I have not found any official documentation that states it is unsupported.
    – cpiasecki
    Sep 18, 2018 at 17:43
  • You will need to open a support case with Microsoft to get an official statement. Regardless, web gardens make little sense as you then have the higher overhead of not being able to share resources between the processes of the web garden.
    – user6024
    Sep 18, 2018 at 19:12

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