Device polling - worthwhile?

[Paul Schmehl]

I've been reading about device polling.  I'm wondering if it's worth doing 
on a busy website (4,000,000+ hits/month, 45GB+ bandwidth use).  I 
understand what polling is and how it queues traffic as opposed to the 
"old-fashioned" interrupt method, but do you really gain performance-wise? 
Are there any pitfalls to enabling it in the kernel?  (I understand you 
can enable/disable it using ifconfig.)  Any gotchas regarding tuning? 
(This is a production website.  I don't want to cause problems that are 
hard to figure out.)

If it matters, I'm running 6.1 RELEASE, GENERIC kernel, Broadcomm GIG 
NICs, 3.2GHz processor, 2GB of memory, apache 1.3.*

Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Adjunct Information Security Officer
The University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/