Hello John, Thanks for the informative reply, do you know what Intel would mean by advertising the NIC with "Performance — Two Queues (Tx & Rx) " then? If i understand you correctly, are you confirming to me that only a Dual port NIC will deliver different IRQs? Alex On 06/08/2013 11:44 PM, John R Pierce wrote: > wait, the 82579 is just a PHY layer for the Intel 6 Series Express CPU > chipset's built in MAC (p67, z68, hm67, etc chipsets for the Sandy > Bridge family of desktop/mobile CPUs). That combination is also a > 'entry level' desktop/workstation or 'mobile embedded' grade ethernet > interface, not really a server grade interface at all. regardless, its > a single device. single devices, regardless of how many queues they > may happen to have, are not reentrant, and can not deal with multiple > concurrent IRQ handlers poking at their registers at the same time. > you might have more luck with something like this > http://ark.intel.com/products/59062/Intel-Ethernet-Server-Adapter-I350-T2 > but even so, I doubt it will use multiple CPU cores at the same time, > but it probably WILL significantly reduce the CPU overhead of dealing > with high volume ethernet traffic.