Hi All,

Am not very sure if this is the right place but here goes...

I have a SMP system (4 processors) running RedHat Enterprise Linux (EL4). We bought an Intel E1000 GBit card and its working fine . However since we are building an Interent Monitoring System it is imperative that all packets get captured with their content ; not only header ..This doesnt happen and packets get dropped.

We did some extensive performance analysis and found out that there were a huge number of context switches if we compared it to the number of interrupts that we get in 'vmstat' ..this I believe is not healthy at all.

My question is : How can we bring the number of context switches down wrt the number of interrupts?
I did manage to find something about interrupt driven or polling mode..but have no clue how to check whether my kernel is in Interrupt driven or polling mode.

Found this link where there are a few recommendations for FreeBSD...I need to know a place which tells me how do to switch to Polling mode for Enterprise Linux.Any suggestions are welcome..

If any additional information , test results , configs are needed please post and Ill be more thn happy to oblige.

Thnx
Arvind