How to make use of both the processors in Dual processor

[aphanri]

support.microsoft.com/kb/896256

I am using Intel Core 2 duo processor. My question is, whenever i run my application i would like to know whether my software is using both the processors or a single processor. How do i know it? Is there any way to see that? If it is using single processor, how to make use of both the processors? Please help me out. I need this to improve my software performance.

[Mr Snrub]

<TL;DR>

There is nothing you need to change in order to make Windows or applications running on it use multiple processors.

</TL;DR>

Windows is a symmetric multi-processing (SMP) operating system and all threads are able to run on any available logical processor by default (CPU affinity is set to "all").

The Windows kernel is multi-threaded so it can use multiple processors at the same time for its own work (or on behalf of device/filter drivers), the same goes for some of the user-mode processes provided with the OS.

3rd party applications or those that you write yourself must be written to create their workloads so that it can run in parallel to use all available CPUs simultaneously (many are not) - otherwise their 1 active thread will be scheduled on any available CPU.

There is no way to change this, it is a design issue with the application itself.

You can happily run 2 single-threaded applications and expect them to use both your logical processors simultaneously.

To check the load across your processors, you can use Task Manager - on the Performance tab you can see a CPU Usage History for every logical processor.

One single-threaded application using lots of CPU time may find itself running on the same processor (to take advantage of the L2 cache), or it may get scheduled on alternate processors making the load appear as 50% on both rather than 100% on one.