Hi,
Does anyone happen to know what these overruns are? Everything works, but download/browsing speeds are just simply way too slow. I think it has something to do with the fact that my overruns are always huge, if I knew what they were... Using Fedora Core 4 on GNOME.

Here's my ifconfig:
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:08:74:22:79:52
inet addr:129.116.55.18 Bcast:129.116.255.255 Mask:255.255.255.128
inet6 addr: fe80::208:74ff:fe22:7952/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:74920 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:8130 frame:0
TX packets:49275 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:96276683 (91.8 MiB) TX bytes:3693964 (3.5 MiB)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0xec00

Notice how the overruns on RX packets is large, when it should be zero...

Any help or point in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.
-Art

Receive overruns means that packets are arriving faster than you can receive. That could be:

- A problem with the ethernet card itself
- A driver problem
- A very busy PC
- An interrupt problem

The last ends up being pretty common; some other driver gets the interrupt and throws it away, so the buffers in the ethernet card get full and packets are lost. Check the output of

cat /proc/interrupts

For driver issues, check the output of

lspci

which will identify the type of ethernet card, and search Google for known issues. On some cards, it's possible to increase the receive buffers by adding a parameter.

If you can't find the info by Googling, post the output of the commands and we'll see what we can find.

Thanks a lot macemoneta. It WAS an IRQ problem. I had 3 devices using the same IRQ as my ethernet controller. I moved it to it's own IRQ and the overruns have seized.

hello, macemoneta.

you say that "Receive overruns means that packets are arriving faster than you can receive."
so now, i am getting confuse that, what is the different between "overruns" and "dropped"?