Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1213 mails)

[Per Jessen <per@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wrote:

> I'm testing a new fibre connection at 50/10Mbit, and the network
> interface card is showing an increasing number of overruns when
> I "stress" the link with a lengthy download from a high-speed source.
> In the last 4Gb download, I saw the counter increase by at least
> 10000.   
>
> Googling has informed me that "Receive overruns means that packets are
> arriving faster than you can receive".  The firewall to which the
> fibre is connected is an elderly PIII 800MHz, but I can't quite
> imagine that causing this issue. 

If you've followed the previous thread about network interface overruns,
you will know that switching to a different network card didn't quite
solve the problem, but it did significantly reduce the number of
overruns. 
As Google suggested, it seems quite clear that the machine simply could
not deal with the flow of interrupts, which was also evident in the
slowing of the system clock!  As far as I can tell, the clock was
slowed down due to the system being unable to process the clock
interrupt in a timely manner. Or is there another reason why the system
clock would slow down during periods of many interrupts? Not just a few
seconds, more than 1000s over e.g. 25-30mins. 

The question now remains - can this system be tuned/tweaked to process
network interrupts better/faster?  Any applicable kernel parameters? 
It is a dedicated firewall/router box with a PIII 800MHz and 512Mb RAM.  
The currently installed oS is 11.0 with kernel 2.6.25.5. 



-- 
Per Jessen, Zürich (10.1°C)

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