On Tuesday, 18 בDecember 2007, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote:
> I am not an expert on this, but what you want might be "NAPI" - a new
> network driver infrastructure designed to solve just that. Google a bit
> - I do not know exactly when it entered 2.6 (and you did not state your
> kernel version) and which drivers use it already.
1. NAPI was new at kernel 2.3.x when it was developed towards 2.4
2. It gives the *driver* the option to toggle between interrupt driven
and polling mode at runtime. E.g:
- A GB ethernet at full speed may better poll the hardware every once
in a while.
- The same card is better off using interrupt driven mode if the
trafic is low.
3. You cannot turn it on/off. The driver may support this optional API
or not. If it supports it, it's the driver sole decision when it's
better to use polling/interrupt-per-packet according it its hardware
specifics.
4. I don't think a single fast ethernet card can severely affect your
hardware interrupt load. So either:
- You have a GB (or maybe 2GB?) ethernet with high load.
- You have several fast-ethernet cards working at full speed.
5. A far better suspect would be the disk controller (e.g: working
without DMA etc.)
6. Why guess?
watch -n10 -d cat /proc/interrupts
And calculate how many interrupts per-sec occured for various devices.
That would give you a rough idea who are the possible suspects.
--
Oron Peled Voice/Fax: +972-4-8228492
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