click perform effects with respect to RAM

[Gordon Lee]

> A little more info about the setup, all three NICs are on the same PCI bus,
> which I believe is of the 33mhz variety.

Three cards on a 32bit/33Mhz bus is pretty busy.  To test whether this
is a bottleneck, take out the crossover cable from the output ports
and connect them instead to some other box, but make sure that the
other box connects at 1000FD, (check the /proc output to be sure).  
With the crossover cable in place, the output packets are traversing 
the PCI bus twice, once on transmit, and then again on receive,
(even though PollDevice(eth[1-2])->Idle will ultimately discard them).

Having a single cpu can also slow things down.  Try boosting the nice
value of click as a test, to see if things improve.  Ideally, the
system would be dual processor, and then the nice value for kclick can
be boosted to -20.  On a single CPU system however, it is impractical
to have the nice value so high, as everything else becomes too starved,
which leads to cryptic behaviour from other parts of the system.

Another hardware issue: What speed are the memory DIMM's rated at ?
All of the packets have to traverse that pipe as well.

It could also be that the chipset is bad to the bone.  Is this some 
bare-bones clone box ?

All that said, 38kpps throughput is *really* low.

     - GL