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Message-ID: <1200349909.15122.31.camel@dell>
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:31:49 -0800
From: "Michael Chan" <mchan@...adcom.com>
To: "Mark Seger" <Mark.Seger@...com>
cc: "netdev" <netdev@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Why are network counters only updated once a second?
On Mon, 2008-01-14 at 15:30 -0500, Mark Seger wrote:
> Eventually the frequency became better aligned at a 1 second interval
> because now the number look better, but the problem I see is that when
> the sampling interval is very close to the monitoring interval you still
> get periodic incorrect data. Furthermore, you now need to know which
> way the counters are updated before you pick a sampling interval! But
> the real point is if anyone ever wants to do finer grained monitoring,
> say every 1/2 or even tenth of a second, they can't because the counters
> won't change between samples. Has this ever been discussed before?
On most Broadcom NICs, the statistics counters are periodically DMA'ed
from the chip and the default interval is roughly 1 second. On most of
these chips, you can override this interval using ethtool -C eth0.
As I mentioned earlier, the 5706/5708 has a bug in the statistics DMA
engine that can corrupt counters from time to time. The workaround is
effective, but you now lose the ability to control the DMA interval.
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