The number of threads is limited to 2 (per client or server) with a Lite license and 8 (per client or server) with a Standard license, while the upper limit for an Enterprise (formerly Gold or HPC) license is 128. EnSight, by default, uses threading according to the license and the number of processors available and will echo this information out to the console at startup.

....

Detected 2 CPU(s)

ensight_client using 2 threads.

....

Detected 2 CPU(s)

ensight_server using 2 threads.

When manually setting these parameters it is a good idea to take into account the number of processors on the system. In general, you will not see benefit from setting the parameters higher than the number of total processors. Because the server, server-of-servers and client operate in a pipelined fashion, it is not necessary to limit one in order to apply more threads to another.

Compute intensive server operations that make use of shared memory parallel computations include isosurface, clipping, and particle trace computations as well as most calculator functions. Client threaded operations include transparency resort and display list creation.