Multicore Support

The Autobahn DX Server is available as single core, four cores or multiples of four cores.

This allows Autobahn DX to take full advantage of the number of cores available on the computer.

The current version of Autobahn DX can be licensed for up to 64 cores. This allows the simultaneous processing of up to 64 files in parallel, thereby reducing the time needed to execute a job. Below is a chart showing the number of pages converted from TIFFs to PDF per minute.

Using multiple cores in a job

More than one core is available on most job step types, but the improvement may not be significant on fast job steps like Merge TIFFs, Split TIFFs, Merge PDFs, and Split PDFs.

Where the use of more than one core would be significant, the number of cores to be used in the step can be set via the Maximum Cores property in the step properties section as shown below.

Maximum number of cores allowed

The maximum number of cores that can be used by Autobahn DX is limited to the smaller of:

• The number of cores licensed

• The number of logical processors (not physical cores) in the CPU.

It is worth bearing in mind that setting this value to the number cores on your system may cause 100% usage of CPU resources by the process. This will have an effect on any other process running on the system.

The Max Available option allows .NET to decide the best number of processors to be used.

Multicore Throttling

Your license key will support a specific number of CPU cores. Autobahn DX will limit the number of concurrent file processing operations to this number and will “throttle” jobs accordingly.

For example, if a 4-core licensed server is currently running a 2-core job and a new job starts that is configured for 4 cores the number of cores allocated to the second job will be reduced accordingly:

Autobahn DX using 2 cores out of 4 allowed.

We will reduce the number of cores in this job from 4 to 2 allowed.

As another example, if a 4-core licensed server is currently running a 4 core job and a new job starts that is configured for 2 cores then the second job will not be able to start until cores are freed up:

Autobahn DX using 4 processors out of 4 allowed.

We will attempt to start the job 18 time(s) over the next 180 seconds.

The retry interval and number of tries is determined by these two config file settings in Autobahn.config (by default this file is in C:\Aquaforest\Autobahn DX\config)

<add key=“jobqueuetimeout” value=“180” />

<add key=“jobqueueinterval” value=“10”/>

Command Line Interface

The Autobahn DX command line interface can also set the number of cores to use. The parameter /maxcores=x can be used to set the number of cores to use to x.

autobahndx.exe /operation=[operation name] /source=[tiff file or folder] /output=[output file] /target=[target folder] [/option=value]…

Example

Generate searchable PDF files from image PDF files found in a folder and subfolders, while keeping the original file names (using 4 processors).

autobahndx.exe /source=c:\in\folder /sourcetype=tree /target=c:\out /output=%FILENAME /outputtype=pdf operation=ocrimagepdf /ocrengine=1 /maxcores=4

To set the number of cores to use, add the parameter listed below with the number of cores.