[frollogaston]

Maybe the NIC does a lot? In past experience, a whole Xeon CPU couldn't keep up with a 10gig NIC if it was sending/receiving min-size UDP packets. Even with Intel DPDK iirc.

[teaearlgraycold]

I believe the CPU gets an interrupt per packet. It’s just not designed to be interrupted that often.

[fragmede]

That's what the DPDK Poll Mode is for.