Where I have observed overcommitting helping, it is often where the task takes longer than the request rate. Simplifying the task helps more. Benchmark and sim

Where I have observed overcommitting helping, it is often where the task takes longer than the request rate. Simplifying the task helps more. Benchmark and simplify is a very good strategy. Your IRQ observation is good. Advising people to set /proc/irq/IRQ_NUMBER/smp_affinity on Linux is a good idea. I don't know how to do this on OSX though, and I have not found a good programmatic way to discover a good setting. I suspect it might be network-card and network-driver specific, but would welcome suggestions. Your DPDK observation is also good, however if I want that level of performance, I might get less complexity by threading TCP directly into the network interrupt.