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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?

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One solution to this problem is to use a combination of disabling irqbalance, cpu isolation and pinning the NIC interrupts to an isolated CPU.

  • Disable irqbalance. This will cause all interrupts to be on CPU0
  • Isolate CPUs 1-3 via a kernel boot parameter "isolcpus=1-3"
  • Manually pin the interrupts for the NIC to one of the isolated CPUs (echo 'cpumask' . /proc/irq//smp_affinity).

Doing this will allow the NIC to have its IRQs run on a CPU which is not bothered by random kernel threads and IRQs from other hardware devices.

Here's a good explanation of how to pin an IRQ to a specific CPU.

https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~brecht/servers/apic/SMP-affinity.txt

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By "current", it means what was common when that page was written, five years ago or so. Every modern Linux distribution that you are likely to use has a modern, smart irqbalance. You're trying to fix a problem that is very, very unlikely to exist.

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  • David, thanks for your answer about the version of irqbalance. I neglected to mention that this system is used in high frequency trading. In this domain, I know that quite a few systems tweak their IRQs and CPU affinities, so while you're right that this is a very unusual aspect to look at for general networking, I need to make sure I understand how this part of the system works.
    – Andy F
    Jul 25, 2012 at 12:15
  • Try irqbalance --debug --oneshot to see what irqbalance is doing. Jul 25, 2012 at 12:17

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