Find out how many actual processors are on your server

Problem:

To find out the number of actual (physical) processors present on your server.

Solution:

Normally while specifying the server configuration, the number of processors is specified. But when it is stated that a server is two processor or four processor etc we don’t know the actual physical processors present. It might be the case that the server is enabled with hyper threading so that a server having two physical processors emulates four processor behavior.

To resolve this confusion, we can use the CPU information file of a system to determine if hyper threading is enabled or not.

To find out if hyper-threading is enabled on the processor:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

check out the flags field.

wp          : yes

flags       : mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe cid

bogomips    : 199.16

If hyper threading is enabled, it will show flag set to ‘ht’ otherwise it will display it as ‘noht’.