irqbalance is a Linux daemon that distributes interrupts over the processors and cores you have in your computer system. The design goal of irqbalance is to find a balance between power savings and optimal performance. To a large degree, the work irqbalance does is invisible to you; if irqbalance performs its job correctly, nobody will ever notice it's there or want to turn it off. It is recommended to run irqbalance from the system boot-scripts. For example, add the following lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.local: if [ -x /usr/sbin/irqbalance ]; then /usr/sbin/irqbalance fi Options that you can pass to the command are described in the man page.