You can outright install the openonload drivers, preload to intercept epoll, and it literally just works.
Going to efvi can cut out ~1us but that requires specifically targeting efvi, and has more operational / code setup pain. Works on stock Linux all the same though
I am pinning the cores, disabled SMT and turbo boost, but haven't tried isolcpu because this has to reboot the computer.
The gold standard (in my experience) for latency measurement is setting up a packet splitting, marking your outbound packets with some hash/id of the inbound packet, taking hardware timestamps of all these on some dedicated host, and putting it all together after the fact. Ultimately packet-in to packet out is all the matters anyways
You can actually get pretty solid internal timestamps (how long did I take to fully process event X) with TSC counters, but you then have a coordinated omissions problem: https://www.programmingtalks.org/talk/how-not-to-measure-lat...