Irqbalance is the Linux utility tasked with making sure that interrupts from your hardware devices are handled in as efficient a manner as possible (meaning every cpu handles some of the interrupt work), while at the same time making sure that no single cpu is tasked with a inappropriately large amount of this work. Irqbalance constantly analyzes the amuont of work interrupts require on your system and balances interrupt handling across all of your systems cpus in a fair manner, keeping system performance more predictable and constant. This should all happen transparently to the user. If irqbalance performs its job right, nobody will ever notice it's there or want to turn it off.

Recent News:

We've recently migrated the code base over to git. This really just makes maintenence easier. Full history should still be available (not that there was much change beforehand). Make sure to update/reclone your trees

Also, theres a new irqbalance branch called new_balancer. Its is a major updating of irqbalance. It significantly reworks the code, consolidating and commonizing data, and updates the metrics we use to meausre irq load distirbution. Instead of relying solely in irq counts now, we rely on irq and softirq time recorded in /proc/stat to make a reasonable guess at how much time each cpu spends processing the irqs assigned to it. This branch will be merged to the main branch soon and released as irqbalance version 1.0.