If I'm understanding properly, you have a network monitor program of some sort that consumes a lot of system (?) or network (?) resources. You want to know whether to dedicate 5 machines, each running the application, or run the application on one machine with 5 network interfaces. The answer depends on the problem: If the application is consuming system resources, you need to run on multiple machines. If it's consuming network card resources but the machine still has processor cycles left, then add multiple NICS to one machine.