The CPU is still the heart of the instance, and today most have multiple CPU cores. While CPU is not typically a bottleneck with Cassandra, having more available processing power can give a boost to heavy operational workloads.
One way in which modern CPUs get more processing power is by provisioning a single CPU core into two virtual CPUs. This is known as Hyper-Threading. Hyper-Threading allows a single CPU core to handle multiple tasks in parallel, essentially functioning as if it were two cores. Author and engineer Amy Tobey provides some insight here in her "Amy's Cassandra 2.1 tuning guide," indicating that although many databases (Tobey, 2015) recommend disabling Hyper-Threading, Cassandra has shown to benefit from it.
A production ...
