Limit application to 4 processors instead of 8

I recently built an internal file server for our office that uses Windows 10 Pro. The hardware is a Dell server with an Intel Xeon 4 core/8 processor chip.

I have an application server software app that I pay an annual license fee for the use of it. I received a call from the company I purchased it from saying my license is only valid when run from 4 processors and I am running it on 8 processors. They want to double my annual license fee as a result.

When I view the service in task manager and use the option to set affinity, it shows it utilizing all 8 processors. If I unselect 4 of the processors, will the service only show as running on 4 processors when it ‘calls home’?

If this isn’t the answer, is there anything I can do to force it to only run on 4 processors?

thanks

Changing the affinity will not change the number of processors the application sees, assuming they are using standard win32 API calls to get the count.

You can force Windows to only use a certain number of cores with MSCONFIG or you could disable Hyper-threading, but that will affect all applications. And even if you do so there are multiple ways a program can still get the true number of cores/threads on the system unless you run it in a VM, which likely has more licensing implications.

You should consult your license agreement to see precisely what is governing the fee.

Specifying the maximum number of cores is somewhat ambiguous. In my view the best way to do this would be to specify it as the number of cores that the application can use, limited by setting process affinity. This would allow the user to use whatever cores are available for other applications. But the software supplier may see things differently. It could also mean the number of logical or physical cores in the system. All of these are easily and reliably available to the application. Limiting process affinity won't effect either number.

You really need clarification of what the specification of cores really means. This should be clearly stated in the license agreement but if not you will need to consult with the software supplier.