100% with you there. I can count one time in my entire 15 years where I had to pin a production workload for performance, and it was Hyperion.

In 99% of use cases, there’s other, easier optimizations to be had. You’ll know if you’re in the 1% workload pinning is advantageous to.

For everyone else, it’s an excellent explainer why most guides and documentation will sternly warn you against fussing with the NUMA scheduler.

> In 99% of use cases, there’s other, easier optimizations to be had. You’ll know if you’re in the 1% workload pinning is advantageous to.

Cpu pinning can be super easy too. If you have an application that uses the whole machine, you probably already spawn one thread per cpu thread. Pinning those threads is usually pretty easy. Checking if it makes a difference might be harder... For most applications, it won't make a big difference, but some applications will see a big difference. Usually a positive difference, but it depends on the application. If nobody has tried cpu pinning your application lately, it's worth trying.

Of course, doing something efficiently is nice, but not doing it is often a lot faster... Not doing things that don't need to be done has huge potential speedups.

If you want to cpu pin network sockets, that's not as easy, but it can also make a big difference in some circumstances; mostly if you're a load balancer/proxy kind of thing where you don't spend much time processing packets, just receive and forward. In that case, avoiding cross cpu reads and writes can provide huge speedups, but it's not easy. That one, yeah, only do it if you have a good idea it will help, it's kind of invasive and it won't be noticable if you do a lot of work on requests.