AFAIK The interrupt rate depends on the traffic that passess thru your NIC.
But not that much from the bandwidth, than the packet rate. High rate of
small packets will probably be able to saturate a slower machine.
I've seen situations that the local console is completely "frozen" by that.

P.S.: You should also take into account the firewall, if you are running
any.
Optimizing your ruleset can greately reduce the load.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kamal R Prasad" <kamalrpr@in.ibm.com>
To: <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
Cc: <tech-net@netbsd.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2003 10:20 AM
Subject: interrupt rate from a NIC


> Hello,
>  I would like information about the rate at which interrupts can come into
> the system(a Pentium 4 for example) from a  NIC. can it be ever so high
> that the bottom half has only sufficient time to enqueue the packets but
> not to process them (because of the handler getting invoked so often).?
> thanks
> -kamal
>
>
>