What are the effects of increasing number of worker process for a sharepoint application hosted in Windows Server 2003

I have a sharepoint application hosted on a windows 2003 server with the maximum number of worker process set as 1 in the application pool. There are couple of sharepoint application hosted and one of them being very active all the time.

I get this random workflow stuck issue when the on task changed event in the workflow doesnot get fired i开发者_StackOverflow社区n my application.

As all requests are being processed by the worker process,I am considering increasing the number of worker process to 2 to handle the load.

I really wanted to know what are the effects of increasing the worker process number before i proceed.

Any help appreciated, Thanks!

One worker process doesn't mean one thread of end user activity can be processed at once. One worker process is multi-threaded. Most likely adding more worker processes won't fix what is wrong with your current setup. What it will do is increase your memory usage as each worker process has to load a copy of the asp.net runtime as well as the relevant SharePoint assemblies and cache.