Re: tg3 bad performance, lots of hardware interrupts

On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 14:49 -0700, David Miller wrote:

From: Harald Hannelius <redacted>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:53:56 +0200 (EET)

quoted

I experience a lot of hardware interrupts with a BCM5751 PCI-express NIC 
(tg3). modprobe tg3, ifconfig ethX up and friends makes the system 
unresponsive. Just having the interface up makes the system sluggish.

I just tested a similar NIC using the same kernel and driver, but I did
not notice anything unusual.  netperf gave me 941Mbps.

quoted

Onboard forcedeth works fine (with the same cable).

iperf gives me just 2Mbps on a 1Gbps ethernet. Load average near 1.0. top 
reports 40-50%hi (hardware interrupts) when generating traffic over that 
interface.

Can you look at /proc/interrupts to see roughly how many are reported
per second when link is down, link is up with no traffic, and with
traffic?

Finally, you can also try ethtool -t eth0 to see if it passes a simple
self test.