I find this very interesting. As already pointed out, I imagine there could be some subtle benefit to delivering a majority of connections to a single process

I find this very interesting. As already pointed out, I imagine there could be some subtle benefit to delivering a majority of connections to a single process while it isn't overloaded, so even perfectly even load balancing can have some disadvantages. majke, the benchmark you did with SO_REUSEPORT, was that against a NUMA system / recent kernel? I've completely lost track of it, but I think I remember reading that there has been some work on mapping the NIC Queues, Cores, and Workers together, allowing a flow to worker being able to be processed on the same core. I'm just curious if the benchmark shown was able to take advantage of that or not (and as an aside how much of a benefit mapping this together really has).