From: James Chapman <jchapman@katalix.com>
Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2007 20:36:20 +0100

David Miller wrote:

quoted

From: James Chapman <jchapman@katalix.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2007 18:16:45 +0100

quoted

Does hardware interrupt mitigation really interact well with NAPI?

It interacts quite excellently.

If NAPI disables interrupts and keeps them disabled while there are more 
packets arriving or more transmits being completed, why do hardware 
interrupt mitigation / coalescing features of the network silicon help?

Because if your packet rate is low enough such that the cpu can
process the interrupt fast enough and thus only one packet gets
processed per NAPI poll, the cost of going into and out of NAPI mode
dominates the packet processing costs.