Just a quick update: After roughly 2 days, irqbalance grew from its initial usage of roughly 18MB to almost 300MB, see below:
delta@zauner:~$ uptime && cat /proc/`pidof irqbalance`/status | grep Vm 16:22:42 up 2 days, 1:38, 2 users, load average: 0,00, 0,01, 0,05 VmPeak: 279340 kB VmSize: 279276 kB VmLck: 0 kB VmPin: 0 kB VmHWM: 261520 kB VmRSS: 261520 kB VmData: 260224 kB VmStk: 136 kB VmExe: 36 kB VmLib: 4468 kB VmPTE: 564 kB VmSwap: 108 kB delta@zauner:~$ sudo service irqbalance restart delta@zauner:~$ uptime && cat /proc/`pidof irqbalance`/status | grep Vm 16:23:20 up 2 days, 1:39, 2 users, load average: 0,00, 0,01, 0,05 VmPeak: 19400 kB VmSize: 19336 kB VmLck: 0 kB VmPin: 0 kB VmHWM: 1952 kB VmRSS: 1952 kB VmData: 284 kB VmStk: 136 kB VmExe: 36 kB VmLib: 4468 kB VmPTE: 52 kB VmSwap: 0 kB delta@zauner:~$ LC_ALL=C stat /sys/bus/pci stat: cannot stat '/sys/bus/pci': No such file or directory
