Core Isolation

Dedicated CPU for 'execute_stage'

⚠️ WARNING! This method is still under heavy testing ⚠️

To improve performance, we isolated a dedicated CPU core and pinned the execute_stage process to it. This reduced resource contention between system services and the critical workload.

We chose core 2 (hello Solana!) and then determined its sibling vCPU ID:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu2/topology/thread_siblings_list

Next, add the isolation settings to /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nohz_full=2,18 isolcpus=2,18 irqaffinity=0-1,3-17,19-31"

Then applied the changes and rebooted:

update-grub
reboot

After the node is up, pin the execute_stage thread to core 2.

sudo taskset -cp 2 $execute_stage_pid

To simplify this, use the pin-core.sh script from our GitHub in the background. After the node starts, run pin-core.sh — it will automatically find execute_stage thread and move it to the core defined inside the script.

Dedicated CPU for 'val_worker'

WARNING! THIS IS NOT GOOD TESTED YET ! A similar approach may also be beneficial for all validation processes val_worker. Note: This can significantly reduce performance on servers with a small number of cores.

A script for pinning val_worker procceses to dedicated cores has already been prepared.

On modern multi-processor systems, additional performance gains may be achieved by disabling SMT (Hyper-Threading), as this reduces contention between sibling threads and improves performance predictability.