On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 11:39:22AM +0300, Laine Stump wrote:
> I recently bought an Athlon motherboard with a builtin Realtek 8139 
> ethernet chip (Yeah, I knew realtek chips were bad, and didn't base my 
> decision on that; it was basically a "gimmee"). Last night I was ripping a 
> bunch of new CDs onto an NFS-mounted drive on another machine and happened 
> to look at "systat vmstat" output and noticed that the machine was 
> spending >65% of CPU time in interrupt code! (and this is on an Athlon XP 
> 1800+). I turned off the machine, plugged in a spare Intel 82559-based 
> ethernet card and restarted - interrupt CPU usage dropped down to 2%!
> 
> I understand that Realtek chips are bad, but are they really *this bad*! 
> What is it in ~1000 interrupts per second that can use up 65% of an Athlon 
> XP 1800+?
> 
> I'm using -current as of about 10 days ago.

When I downloaded a 600MB ISO image via ftp today, interrupt load was
between 0.5% and 3.0%, at constant transfer speed of ~600KB/s. I have a
standalone Realtek 8139 NIC and an Athlon XP 1800+ as you have.

Jun-Young

-- 
Bang Jun-Young <junyoung@mogua.com>