Irqbalance on ER-X no visible improvements

I installed Irqbalance on ER-X OpenWRT 21.02.2 according this https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/irqbalance instructions.

There aren't improvements in download speed, I have a 1000/500 Mbps PPPoE FTTH and I can reach 600/475 Mbps with and without Irqbalance.
Software flow offloading enabled and hardware flow offloading disabled (because this slow down the speed)
How to understand from this if balancing is happening?

root@router:~# cat /proc/interrupts 
           CPU0       CPU1       CPU2       CPU3       
  8:      48550      48653      48646      48621  MIPS GIC Local   1  timer
  9:       6782          0          0          0  MIPS GIC  63  IPI call
 10:          0      44874          0          0  MIPS GIC  64  IPI call
 11:          0          0      35599          0  MIPS GIC  65  IPI call
 12:          0          0          0      44048  MIPS GIC  66  IPI call
 13:       2799          0          0          0  MIPS GIC  67  IPI resched
 14:          0       3450          0          0  MIPS GIC  68  IPI resched
 15:          0          0       3807          0  MIPS GIC  69  IPI resched
 16:          0          0          0       2935  MIPS GIC  70  IPI resched
 17:          0          0          0          0  MIPS GIC  19  1e000600.gpio-bank0, 1e000600.gpio-bank1, 1e000600.gpio-bank2
 19:         12          0          0          0  MIPS GIC  33  ttyS0
 20:     114488          0          0          0  MIPS GIC  10  1e100000.ethernet
 22:          0          0          0          0  1e000600.gpio  12  keys
ERR:          0

Try installing the htop package and run it in a separate terminal window while performing network throughput tests with and without irqbalance enabled. htop will show load on each of the four threads on your ER-X.

When I was using an ER-X as my gateway, I found irqbalance helped increase fq_codel/simple throughput to 200 Mbps, so it can certainly help with some things.

The ER-X is not going to do more than ~600 Mbps with just software offloading. You need hardware offloading to get Gigabit with this device.

22.03 and current snapshot include a large number of MT7621 hardware offloading fixes relative to 21.02. You might try upgrading to the latest 22.03 rc5 (when announced - it was just tagged, so give it a couple more days) or install a current snapshot, then give hardware offloading a try again.

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