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Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:58:40 -0500
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From: JD Bronson <jbronson@sixcompanies.com>
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Subject: device polling on 6.2-stable..use? yes/no?
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Anyone using device polling on 6.2stable (i386) ?
I have been reading up on this and seen some good and some bad but 
nothing definitive.

I have bge NICs in these machines and they are running as routers, 
and  running pf.

When I enabled it in the kernel and then via rc.conf (since sysctl 
use is depreciated now) ...I can see a difference in "vmstat -i"
presuming thats the correct way to check.

With polling DISABLED...vmstat shows ever increasing values for example:

vmstat -i
interrupt                          total       rate
irq4: sio0                             3          0
irq6: fdc0                            10          0
irq14: ata0                        12210          0
irq15: ata1                        78834          2
irq22: bge0                       430416         11
irq23: bge1                       917826         24
cpu0: timer                     75098549       2000
cpu1: timer                     75092636       1999
Total                          151630484       4038

and when I do a large network operation (like ftp an ISO) it 
increases and increases....however, with device polling compiled and 
configured (all default values though in sysctl) - I do not see an 
increase in vmstat numbers for the nics...I figured thats good...but 
I might be wrong?

I dont do anything higher than WAN(10MB) and LAN(100MB).

But if anyone has any suggestions or comments  -especially values to 
adjust in sysctl, please chime in.

TIA

-JD