Chris Buechler wrote:

> On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 13:46:37 -0500, James W. McKeand <james at mckeand dot biz>
> wrote:
>> 
>> The NSC SC1100 would be the processor in the net4801 (actually
>> 266MHz). The net4501 has a 133MHz AMD ElanSC520, thus the 486 class.
>> 
>> So, between running at 133MHz (vs. 90MHz) and the SDRAM (vs. EDO or
>> whatever) I believe we have the reasons behind the performance
>> difference between a net4501 and a P90 system.
>> 
>> Could the NICs in the P90 also cause problems? How about that ISA
>> NIC...
>> 
> 
> I agree.  I'd look at what NIC's are being used, and get rid of
> anything ISA.  All PCI Intels or 3Coms should make it a closer
> matchup.
> 
> There was recently somebody on the list that I suggested switch to
> Intels, and he posted back later saying it fixed the issue he was
> having, and also dropped CPU utilization from ~35% to ~7% on a PII
> 233.  (I don't remember the exact details, but NIC's can make that big
> of a difference)

And if you do a lot of traffic, *and* have an fxp NIC, it's worth
hacking your config.xml to add the "link0" flag to your ifconfig.
link0 provides IRQ mitigation, thus freeing the CPU a bit.

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