Ethernet card receiving influenced by CPU speed?

From: svilen (svilst_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 04/30/04 

Date: 30 Apr 2004 01:04:11 -0700

Hi everybody,

This is a wild guess but I'm really at odds.

I have tried two 100Mb Ethernet cards on my old pc (486 AMD):
Compaq Netelligent 10/100
and Realtek RTL8139.
They both install, ping, transmit fine, but receive very very slow
(taking several minutes for a couple of MBs). 'ifconfig eth1' gives
lots of
errors, overruns,dropped packets (more than the good packets).
At the same time I have another ethernet card (10Mb Winbond NE2000
clone) on
this old machine which works abolutely fine. On top of this the
RTL8139 works
without errors on another faster machine (Celeron 450MHz).
Note that the Linux distributions,kernel versions,drivers on both
machines are the same.
I have not tested Compaq Netelligent on the faster machine.

I have tried compiling drivers as modules and as built-ins - it's all
the same.
Also tried changing pci slots, switch ports - without result.

So, is it possible that the cpu is not fast enough to process packets
coming on a 100Mb connection?

Thank you.

Svilen Stoilov
svilst at hotmail.com