[asterisk-users] Interrupt rates and voip traffic

[Gordon Henderson]

On Mon, 8 Jan 2007, Rajkumar S wrote:

> Hi,
>
> This is slightly off topic, but here I go any way...
>
> VoIP traffic has lot's of smaller packets, and since each packet can
> generate an interrupt, is there any way to determine the irq rates in
> a machine, and more importantly to know if I am hitting any of the
> limits in Linux or to determine how much interrupts per second can my
> box handle ?
>
> There seems to absolutely no information about his particular metric any 
> where..

watch -n1 cat /proc/interrupts

That'll give you the basic counters, but to generate graphs, etc. you'll 
need to use something else. Maybe MRTG.

As to what the limits are , I've no idea - a lot will depend on your
hardware, cpu, kernel compile options and so on.

You may want to know how many packets a second that can pas through an 
interface - that may be more informative than interrupts though. You can 
query packets per second via SNMP or simple using ifconfig and looking at 
the numbers.

Gordon