I heard from a colleague that multiport NICS aren't as good as many 1 port NICs because the multiport NICs share an IRQ. To me that sounds like an advantage! If you think about it, if both network devices on the card, need to speak to the kernel, they just need to send on interrupt. This results in one context switch instead of two. So if you have both ports heavily loaded (say doing 70Mb), that would result in millions of context switched, correct? If you had 2 nics, you would have twice the number of context switches which will kill CPU performance.
I've also seen server vendors mention that their onboard NICs have unique IRQs. So they market this as an advantage! Does anyone have some insight on this?
Thanks!
I've also seen server vendors mention that their onboard NICs have unique IRQs. So they market this as an advantage! Does anyone have some insight on this?
Thanks!