The title of the article does not mention CloudFlare; only bypassing. The fact that the CloudFlare architecture pushes a higher bandwidth of packets into the network kernel and bypasses the rest does not make it a good technique or to be recommended. If you are primarily interested in the best performance with a single NIC solution then I believe it is suboptimal. Why? You are asking the CPU to do two different types of work; optimized and unoptimized. Because of cache line pollution then the "unoptimized" work via the network kernel will pollute the other work. I may be wrong but I would bet you'd get better performance by separating your CloudFlare specific workload onto two boxes, each with one NIC. In this scenario then no cache line pollution can occur. Of course, these two boxes might not be easily possible within three existing CloudFlare architecture. But this has nothing to do with the general idea of packets bypassing the kernel. After the bypass you want the CPU to process those packets in the most efficient way...