Grouping NIC interrupt requests

Hello everyone,

(I may not understand all of this very well, thus my questions might be somewhat unclear.)

As far as I understand, an Ethernet NIC throws an interrupt request every time it has received a complete frame. Sometime later, the OS will copy the frame from the NIC's memory (?) to some kernel buffer in RAM.

If I receive a high rate of small packets, my system will be busy servicing interrupts, and won't get any real work done.

Would it be possible to configure the NIC to throw interrupt requests only when certain thresholds are reached?

e.g.

50 packets 5000 bytes or even: max(50 packets, 5000 bytes)

(This might be called "batching IRQ".)

By the way, how big are consumer-grade NIC buffers these days? I would think a NIC can buffer at least 50 frames (75,000 bytes).

Regards.

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Posted 5 years ago by Spoon in Ethernet LAN

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