I have a number of windows processes that pass messages between them hat a high rate using tcp to local host. Aside from testing on actual hardware how can I assess what my hardware limit will be.

These applications are not doing CPU intensive work, mostly decomposing and combining messages, scanning over them for special flag in the data etc.. The message size is typically 3k and the rate is typically ~10k messages per second. ~30MB per second between processing stages. There may be 10 or more stages depending.

For this type of application, what should I look to for assessing performance? What do I look for in a server performance wise?

I am currently running an XEON L5408 with 32 GB ram. But I am assuming cache is more important than actual ram size as I am barely touching the ram.