Hacker News Reader

There's no direct correlation between NIC queues and CPU threads. The days of dedicating one thread to each incoming connection and/or HTTP request are long behind us, not to mention there are many tasks that require a lot of processing with little to no network activity.

View on HN

That's not true. NIC queues and CPUs are still very important to get good performance on servers by pinning different queues to different cores.

Only if your workload involves passing around a lot of network traffic (e.g. a load balancer) or is highly latency-sensitive.

I've got backend servers that routinely max out 32c/64t CPUs but push so little traffic that replacing the NIC with a cell phone modem would make no discernible difference. There are many types of server workloads where the NIC is not the bottleneck at all, so the parent's argument that low NIC queue counts make high CPU core counts useless is false.

The parent said "but it might not be useful". "Might" being an important word here.

"Server use cases can often run more threads, but it might not be useful" != "low NIC queue counts make high CPU core counts useless "

You're debating an argument that was never made.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com