Where I have observed overcommitting helping, it is often where the task takes longer than the request rate. Simplifying the task helps more.<p>Benchmark and simplify is a very good strategy.<p>Your IRQ observation is good. Advising people to set &#x2F;proc&#x2F;irq&#x2F;IRQ_NUMBER&#x2F;smp_affinity on Linux is a good idea. I don&#x27;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.<p>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.