I recently stood up a new cardano-node service. I’m running pre-compiled Linux binaries v1.29.
It took over 48 hours to do the initial blockchain synchronization with +RTS -N2 (telling cardano-node to use 2 CPU’s).
I later changed the cardano-node environment to +RTS -N so that it would use all available CPU’s. I increased the number of CPU’s of my server to 6 and it appeared to complete synchronization quicker. Granted I was already at about 98% at that point. CPU utilization did dramatically increase with the new environment setting.
After synchronization was complete it seemed like CPU utilization dropped to basically nothing while at the same time keeping up on blockchain synchronization with no issues. I then dropped the number of CPU’s down to 4 and left it running with the -N option, thus instructing cardano-node to use all four CPU’s.
On to my question. Is there any benefit to running 4 CPUs with the -N option versus the default configuration of -N2 or 2 CPU’s?
Considering that the CPU utilization is so low after synchronization. I have not started running pool activities. Are the number of CPU’s a factor when running a pool versus not running a pool?