hello. I'd be very surprised if the problem is running interfaces in promiscuous mode. Anyone using bridge(4), or vlans, for example, is runing their interfaces in promiscuous mode, as is anyone running a dhcp server, or any sort of arpwatch. I find it highly unlikely that the network stack is that broken. I'm guessing it's a memory issue with darkstat -- specifically, it has a memory leak that runs the system it runs on out of RAM. I bet if you add a ton of swap to a system on which you run darkstat, you'll find it runs longer before it hangs, and, I'm guessing you'll notice there is a lot of swap in use before it hangs. NetBSD has never been that good at dealing with memoory shortages.
-thanks -Brian
