[plug] What's "too much work at interrupt"?

[scott at linuxit.com.au]

> Bernd Felsche wrote:
>
>> The reason I was asking was to determine if it's the NIC that's
>> dead; or the DMA/interrupt chip. If only the NIC; I'll plug another
>> in the PCI bus. If it's DMA/interrupt, then it's a new motherboard.
>
> Probably the NIC. Try a new NIC first anyway - they're cheaper than new
> boards ;-)
>
I had the exact same problem last month. It was driving me f***en nuts. I
had a fa310 though. My computer was a gigabyte with Duron and 512 MB RAM.
The problem started when I started converting videos on the network drive
both reading the source and writing the output. There was a lot of work on
the network. After the usual cable and switch swap. I did a kernel hack on
the tulip_core.c file and changed the max packets per interrupt. This
worked marginally. I then changed NICs, first a cheap Realtek which was
worse, then an expensive 3c509 which was better but still not good enough.

I changed mainboards and all the cards work fine. I was never really happy
about the board I originally had, but it never really worked hard until
recently. In the end it was no good. I am under the impression this
happens because the memory on the card is full and is waiting for the
computer to take it away. In the meantime more data comes and the original
is lost. The reason it affects some cards more than others is the amount
of memory cheaper cards don't have.