I just wanted to see if i could get as much performance out of the box that i can but i am seeing that fedora does do a pretty good job of managing resources. Thanks very much for that info, I'll add it to my memory banks and i'll post back if i see any benefit of setting the cpu affinity.
[EDIT] Ok i found this just for info.
to set affinity, use the "taskset" program that comes with schedutils.
examples:
/usr/bin/taskset -p 01 9381 << pid
/usr/bin/taskset -p 02 132 << pid
/usr/bin/taskset -p 03 3049 << pid
first line tells kernel to run process #9381 (this is the pid you get in ps) on the first cpu. second line tells kernel to run process #132 on the second cpu.
third line, tells the kernel to run process #3049 on both cpus (3=1+2, bitwise)
ie. if you have a quad box and you want to run process 85 on the third cpu. /usr/bin/taskset -p 04 85 would do it. or, to run it on cpus 1 and 4, i'd use -p 09.