> I don't think that this ends up being a problem with cards that generate
> few interrupts, and video cards should be in that category, but I'm not
> sure. Mixing ISA ethernet or ISA SCSI with PCI ethernet or SCSI is
> probably a bad idea, though, in a server. And it may be that having ANY
> ISA cards causes conservative assumptions to be automatically made that
> effectively increase latencies.
Does this mean that pulling mp3s off the network (PCI net card) to play on
my oldish (ISA) SB16 could be slowing my machine down? Do I understand
correctly that there is a performance hit, but not a reliability hit--that
the machine automatically corrects to maintain the slow ISA bus?
In terms of quantity of interrupts, here is my /proc/interrupts (uptime
reports 9+ days):
[root@xenon]# cat /proc/interrupts
CPU0 CPU1
0: 39136593 39090719 IO-APIC-edge timer
1: 71515 71586 IO-APIC-edge keyboard
2: 0 0 XT-PIC cascade
5: 341235 348383 IO-APIC-edge soundblaster
8: 0 0 IO-APIC-edge rtc
12: 816610 814963 IO-APIC-edge PS/2 Mouse
13: 1 0 XT-PIC fpu
16: 1989136 1989007 IO-APIC-level 3c905 Boomerang 100baseTx
17: 445756 445591 IO-APIC-level BusLogic BT-958
NMI: 0
IPI: 0
Almost as many soundblaster interrupts as local disk controller interrupts!!
But over one-sixth as many soundblaster interrupts as network interrups!!
Hmmm... This would be an interesting analysis to do on several systems
with several card combinations... But hey, why did you think I bought
my second CPU? To play MP3s!!! :)
Brendan
