# Kafka performance: CPU

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Published 2022-12-03

This tutorial explains to you the impact of the CPU on the Kafka server performance.

Here are some information to retain about the CPU & Kafka cluster performance:

CPU is not generally a performance bottleneck in production environment as long as Kafka doesn't do any message transformation.
CPU can be used for compression. The compression will increase the CPU usage. However, if the producer and the consumers compress/decompress the messages, the CPU of Kafka broker is not impacted.
In production environment the messages are encrypted (when SSL enabled), so the CPU will be used for decrypt/encrypt the messages. This will add a load on the CPU. Note that if SSL is enabled, the CPU requirements can be significantly higher.
You should choose a modern processor with multiple cores. Common clusters utilize 24 core machines.
If you need to choose between faster CPUs or more cores, choose more cores. The extra concurrency that multiple cores offers will far outweigh a slightly faster clock speed.