I currently have PlanetPress Production running on an intel i7 860 processor with Windows Home Premium operating system. I have a PP process with a PP document where every page has a unique PDF placed on it. The total pages are from 40,000 to 60,000 each run.

If I split it into smaller batches (about 2,000 pages per batch) and run each batch separately (one at a time), it takes about 10 hours and the CPU runs at around 10%.

If I split it into smaller batches and let PP run multi-threaded, I notice that ppalmbic seems to run 8 instances and the cpu stays at 100%, speeding the process up to about 1.45 hours.

I am thinking of building a service with these specs:

AMD Opteron 6272 with 16 cores(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113036).
Windows Server 2008 OS 64bit
8gb of ram.

How many instances of ppalambic would a server like this be able to run simultaneuously?

That kind of hardware should allow you to double the number of ppalmbic instances. Note, however, that this doesn't necessarily mean the processes will run twice as fast, as there are other considerations coming into play (RAM, disk access, etc.).

But you should still see some significant improvement in processing time.

If you do get this new machine, it would be interesting if you could post your results for all of us to see.

If you use the default, the number of instances of PlanetPress Alambic is double the number of virtual cores, with a minimum of 3 and a maximm of 8. This was decided because at some point, the hard drive becomes the limiting factor and increasing the number of instances would actually result in a performance degradation, even if the CPU usage was not at 100%.

However, you can override the default by setting your own maximum number of instance. This can be done in the PlanetPress Workflow Preferences, in the Messenger section. You can put as much as 32 instances, although at that point the hard drive bandwidth will probably kill performance, as mentioned above.

I Confirme This. You must have a very huge disk system (multiple writing arms, We do test on SSD drive, It was amazing, but we don't pick this technology because disk will die soo fast ;-)