OK, here's a little update on this problem. As I told you earlier in the thread, we did some successful tests with the 4-port Intel 82576 card, HOWEVER we only tested two ports, em0 och em1. When the card later was put into the production machine we chose to use em0 as the unprocteded if and em2 as the protected.
When we connected the machine to the router, we only got a throughput at about 100 Mbit/s 100% CPU, busy handling interrupts, while the cards only generate about 3000 intr/s each. As it turns out, the problem is the same as with the dual port cards, but now it only applies to em2 and em3. If we any of those ports, the machine get bogged down completely and the livelock rate is about 10 per second. If we only use em0 and em1, it performs really good. With real traffic, we've had some peaks at about 750 Mbit/s at 80% CPU and when testing with iperf we get 936 Mbit/s at 90%i CPU (8200 intr/s). This leads me to believe that there are some IRQ conflicts that may or may not be caused by the driver. This is the vmstat -iz output of the production machine: interrupt total rate irq0/clock 743258 99 irq144/acpi0 0 0 irq114/ppb2 0 0 irq112/em0 52133849 7004 irq113/em1 52036815 6991 irq114/em2 0 0 irq115/em3 0 0 irq115/ppb6 0 0 irq112/em4 41319 5 irq113/em5 0 0 irq114/ppb10 0 0 irq96/uhci0 0 0 irq97/uhci1 0 0 irq96/uhci2 0 0 irq97/uhci3 0 0 irq96/ehci0 0 0 irq98/pciide0 8162 1 irq99/pciide1 0 0 irq99/ichiic0 0 0 irq145/com0 0 0 irq146/com1 0 0 irq147/pckbc0 645 0 irq148/pckbc0 0 0 Total 104964048 14102 Brgds, Peter
