>>Er... do you mean different servers/computers, or different processors on the same server? NT multiprocessor support is symmetric; you can't configure it to, say, run 5 light tasks on 1 CPU and 1 heavy one on the other. In very general terms, if a thread is scheduled to get some CPU time, it gets the one least loaded at that moment.
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>Well, it only took 3 days of constant toiling to replace my fried server OS-registry SCSI drive, re-install NT Server, restore all backup files, and get the services going. The tape registry restore would not work no matter what experts I called in to assist (too much security, basically), so I finally had to reinstall and reconfigure virtually everything on the server, while fending off angry users armed with pitchforks. Ugh...is it Friday yet?
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>Anyway, I mean 1 server, two processors. My new server goal is to configure the server so that the few heavy users will generally be running on 1 CPU (and probably only one at a time, only occasionally), and most lighter users on the other unit. One of our hardware people suggested dual processors for this - it didn't cost a lot more, so I went with it. You don't think this will work very well, either explicitly or implicitly? I was hoping to channel certain users explicitly...

No, it won't work the say you're thinking/hoping. You can't partition processors in this fashion under NT. NT treats them as a shared pool.

Looking back on the above, are your "heavy" users running processes on the server itself (e.g. via DCOM?) If so, they might *effectively* get a separate CPU. Otherwise, if the server is just serving up files to workstations, acting as a print server, etc. then the second CPU might not be buying you very much.

If you're working with large tables, you might find the server is disk-bound rather than CPU-bound, even with your "heavy" users. In that case, maxing out the RAM (subject to EdR's pointers about motherboard support) would probably give you best throughput, as more disk would be cached.

If you haven't already, fire up the NT Performance Monitor and watch CPU utilization while a "heavy" user runs a task. Might be enlightening.