Re: [announce] [patch] limiting IRQ load, irq-rewrite-2.4.11-B5

Ingo Molnar
2001-10-01T22:50:40Z

On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, Tim Hockin wrote:

> Our solution/needs are slightly different - we want to service as many
> interrupts as possible and do as much network traffic as possible, and
> interactive-tasks be damned.

i the patch in fact enables this too: you can more agressively get irqs
and softirqs executed by increasing max_rate just above the 'critical'
rate you can measure. (and the blocked-interrupts period of time will be
enough to let the softirq work to be finished.) So in fact you might even
end up having higher performance by blocking interrupts in a certain
portion of a timer tick - backlogged work will be processed. Via max_rate
you can partition the percentage of CPU time dedicated to softirq and
process work. (which in your case would be softirq-only work - which
should not be underestimated either.)

Ingo