Does anyone know if CentOS will handle newer CPU's? I have four AMD 16 core chips in my server but it seems like the OS is not handling them properly.

If I run a job from our software on my VM which only has 2 Intel cores (3.3GHz) it runs three times faster than the AMD core (2.6GHz).

Can the CPU speed really make that much of a difference?

The AMD server also has 4 times the amount of RAM and the disks spin at the same rate.

Thought?

You need to do some diagnostic work and figure out what your system is doing. CentOS 5 can support any of the new hardware as long as you are on the latest release, 5.9 was just released. Start looking at what the process is actually doing and work from there. Look at your CPU utilization during the job, is it something as simple as an application variable like a java heap size that needs to be adjusted? Could it be that you have higher priority processes running for other apps on the centos box that is consuming resources? Just some questions to get you started. If you need advice on diagnosing the process let us know.

unless you NEED the older centos 5.9 it would likely be better to use CentOS 6.3

centOS 5.9 is supported , and will be for many years , but it is starting to show it's age .

There are huge differences between the 5.x and 6.x family before you follow any recommendation to upgrade from one major release to the next review the release notes and verify that the changes aren't going to affect your environment.

For instance, I upgraded a redhat 5.3 server to a 6.x server and the new BIOSDEVNAMING feature completely screwed up my udev rules and my networking causing me to re-do a lot of work.