Device polling performance

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> In a message dated 9/25/04 4:12:52 PM Eastern Daylight Time, mike at sentex.net 
> writes:
> >FreeBSD team for developing a stack that uses no resources.
> 
> .... For the record, what I was saying was that a decent machine (e.g. 2.4 
> PIV) should be able to push 200,000 packets per second with decent NICs 
> (em, or fxp) and with a median packet size (see www.caida.org) of about 540 
> bytes, that works out to ~ 100Mb/s.
> No you didn't, you said that 200Kpps would show almost no cpu usage, which
> is utterly ridiculous.
> 
> Mike at sentex.net previously wrote:
> 
> "Given a decent CPU, you wont see very much of a load average at all in the 
> 200Kpps / 100Mb range."

Note that load average and CPU usage are two intirely different things.
You could have a huge amount of CPU usage with a load average hovering
around zero and somewhat vice versa too - eg high load average without
a great deal of CPU usage - though that would be less common.

////jerry