Does allocating ram to certain IRQs offer any kind of performance boost?

[Spoooon]

I ran some benchmarks and it didn't really make any differece. Is there any situation where it would help?

 

[DaddyG]

Don't understand your question. How did you 'allocate RAM' to an IRQ ??

 

[Spoooon]

In your system.ini file, under the 386enh header, you can type in something like "irq10=1024" and that's supposed to give that irq 1 meg of ram. I say supposed to, because it may not even do anything. It was something I ran across on some web site talking about tweaking Windows, etc.

 

[Mday]

yes, it would theoretically offer performance boost when using that device, such as improving upload\download when the IRQ is used by a modem. of course it's not going to make that modem do what it can't do.

 

[DaddyG]

IRQ processing is part of the system software that doesn't get paged out so i'm not sure what could possibly be the benefit of allocating memory to this process.

 

[moocat]

I experimented with allocating 4 meg of ram to the NIC that is connected to my cable modem. It did indeed 'feel' faster in certain situations...I didn't do any benchmarking or testing so my assesment if far from scientific. It wreaked havoc when people connected for gaming though. This was probably due to packets getting buffered up instead of getting processed right away. I've never tried it with a 56k modem. My guess is it has more impact with a high speed connection.

EDIT: DaddyG...the ram isn't used for the interupt process...I believe it becomes a dedicated data buffer for whatever device is assigned that IRQ. It might be reserved for network devices...some kind of secret jabroni Windows sh1t I guess.

 

[Spoooon]

Like I said, I didn't really notice much improvement. I was just wondering if there were any kind of situation I could create that might show whether it makes a difference or not.


<< It did indeed 'feel' faster in certain situations... >>


I to thought it &quot;felt&quot; faster. However, that was probably because of my expectations that it would perform better with the ram allocated. So, I guess it's just one of those things that may or may not work.