I am investigating dropped packets on a dual core, quad XEON box running Linux. One thing I see is irqbalance running on the system. I have a couple of questions. Reading the docs here I think I understand how it is supposed to work, but one thing that seems confusing is this line - "The current Linux irqbalance program is several years old in design, and is blissfully unaware of the ideas of Quad (or even Dual) core or even power usage. The program is conceptually closer to the naive balancing than to the smart interrupt balancer." This seems to indicate that there is an old and a new version of irqbalance. Is this the case? How can you tell which is running on the machine.
Also, if my goal is to optimize packet processing during bursts, do I want to run irqbalance, or should I manually bind the network card to a set of CPUs?