Contributed By: Cliff Hobbs [MVP SMS]
Software Inventory processing in SMS 2003 SP2 has now been changed to be multi-threaded. What does this mean?

Well it is the responsibility of the "Software Inventory Processor" thread of the SMS Executive to handle Software Inventory Processing in SMS. Prior to SP2 this was a single-threaded process.  However, in SP2 Microsoft have now made this multi-threaded so if you have multiple processors in your servers (highly probable), you can now process Software Inventory a lot faster.

For example, if you have two processors in your Site Server you'll see a 200% performance increase in the processing of Software Inventory files if you enable this feature.  If you have four processors in your site Server you'll see a 400% increase, etc.

Some important things to note about enabling this feature:

• This feature comes into it's own if you have a backlog of Software Inventory files on a multi-processor Site Server. If you don't have a backlog of files or if you Site Server seems to be coping at times when you experience a large number of Software Inventory files then you might be better off not enabling it (remember although enabling this feature will help clear the backlog of Software Inventory files it's potentially depriving other resources of CPU processing).
   
• There is no benefit to enabling this setting on single processor Site Servers.
   
• For details on how to enable this feature see the "How do I enable Multi-Threaded Software Inventory Processing in SMS 2003 SP2" article.