Interrupts are signals generated, generally by devices, to notify a CPU that there is processing which needs to be done. Interrupt Request (IRQ) Balancing is the act of dividing these processes up between cores on a CPU. In some situations this may harm performance of applications running on the CPU, as these interrupts consume processor cycles and loads information into memory.

Disabling IRQ balancing will assign all interrupts to a single core by default. It is possible to assign interrupts to certain cores, but that is beyond the scope of this section. To disable IRQ balance, use the following command: