[POLLING] strange interrupt/system load

[Barney Cordoba]

--- On Sun, 9/13/09, rihad <rihad at mail.ru> wrote:

> From: rihad <rihad at mail.ru>
> Subject: Re: [POLLING] strange interrupt/system load
> To: "Barney Cordoba" <barney_cordoba at yahoo.com>
> Cc: freebsd-net at freebsd.org
> Date: Sunday, September 13, 2009, 9:11 AM
> Barney Cordoba wrote:
> 
> > 1) Why are you polling with a NIC that can be
> precisely set to
> > interrupt as often or as little as you like?
> How?
> 
> > 2) Why do so many people run systems with high network
> load with
> > AMD64 builds when its significantly slower to do so?
> Do you have
> > google sized databases so you need 64-bit pointers?
> What's wrong with 64 bits?

I haven't spent a large portion of my life trying to figure
it out exactly, but I'd guess that the larger size of the 
structures and code results in fewer cache hits. It certainly 
makes sense to try both with your workload, as the notion that 
64bits must be faster than 32bits is patently misguided. My rule of 
thumb is that if I don't need 64bits for something, I avoid it.

Barney