I am playing around with irqbalance to tune my 8 core system so I came across this page, http://kb.fusionio.com/KB/a65/irqbalance-avoid-overloading-cpu-0-with-interrupt-requests.aspx Now, lets say I disable irqbalance which will stop my autobalance and I pin all of my interrupts to core 0 and pin eth0 and eth1 to core 1. My application is network and CPU hungry. I am planning to dedicate cpu 3 to 8 for the application using taskset. Is there any draw back to this?