I have server with Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5706 Gigabit Ethernet chips, and 2.6.18-164.2.1.el5 kernel from Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.4 (Tikanga).
During normal work day this machine gets ~ 40000 packets per second (it's database server), and ifconfig shows that it drops about 1 packet per second. Which while not perfect, is acceptable.
but sometimes, something strange happens, and we are getting (?) less packets. For example:
- 13:38:50 43260
- 13:38:51 42930
- 13:38:52 38696
- 13:38:53 33006
- 13:38:54 23013
- 13:38:55 49485
- 13:38:56 37514
- 13:38:57 4858
- 13:38:58 1089
- 13:38:59 31054
- 13:39:00 36540
- 13:39:01 47228
- 13:39:02 35634
- 13:39:03 35348
- 13:39:04 32908
- 13:39:05 33226
- 13:39:06 32639
- 13:39:07 21842
- 13:39:08 38560
This is number of packets per second. As you can see at 13:38:57 and 13:38:58 we had way less packets (this data is from tcpdump).
dropped: stats in ifconfig eth1 output don't change, switch (some cisco stuff) doesn't show any dropped packets.
Anyone knows what it could be?