They are not linear unless all requests take an identical amount of time OR the system is not oversubscribed (common in many workloads) - and even then, the current linux CFS scheduler has a complexity of `O(log N)`.
When you have variable length requests, you will find cores will not always be balanced, it is simply a statistical reality. And in those cases, the kernel will have to migrate your process to a different core, and if you have 256 cores, that core might be really far away.
When you have variable length requests, you will find cores will not always be balanced, it is simply a statistical reality. And in those cases, the kernel will have to migrate your process to a different core, and if you have 256 cores, that core might be really far away.