Improving desktop performance in Fedora 14 by disabling irqbalance

Today I was moving a large quantity of files (with 6/7 parallel copies) from my laptop to my home server via nautilus + gvfs + sftp.

My notebook became almost unusable after a few seconds.

It’s not the latest on hardware, but still it’s a dual core duo with 2.5Gb of RAM, and I expected it to remain usable during network file copy.

So, after some investigation, I noticed that after stopping irqbalance service suddendly the system became very responsive again!

So, this is what I suggest you to do if your system get sluggish moving file via network (or other circumstances that generates a lot of IRQs):

service irqbalance stop

If it works for you, then you can permanently disable it with

chkconfig irqbalance off

and even unistall it completely with

yum remove -y irqbalance

let me know if this worked for you too!