Having been through similar situations in my past life, I can confidently say that they don't need more CPU cores, they need to start really looking at their architecture holistically and identifying the critical path that can be rewritten in priority order for performance. At this point, throwing more hardware at the problem is the wrong thing to do /even/ if it temporarily kicks the can down the road. They have a fundamental system design issue that needs to be addressed, likely piecemeal and prioritized. The first step should be adding more performance instrumentation.
