[eepro100] Increasing Buffers ?

[Marcel Döring]

Hi !

We have serveral gameservers running on one 1,4GHz Athlon and 1,5GB RAM
using an
Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100 with the stock Red Hat 7.1 driver under
2.2.19 and 2.4.13, while the CPU and RAM usage stays quite calm and down
the NIC seems to get to its limits
when running about 4 x 16 Playerslots UT (Unreal Tournament) or Half
Life Servers.

I've read a lot about the "many small packets" Problem, and that even
some big Cisco Routers have trouble with them when they get too much, so
my question is now, is there *any* kind of possibility how I can
increase buffers for the NIC or at least can determine *IF* the NIC is
on its limits and causing the "ping hops" to the players on the
gameservers. 

The players encounter "ping hops" which means that the "ping" raises
from 30 (which is very good) to 200 (which is very bad) from one to the
other second, then, again from one to the other seconds, it drops again
to 30... the strange thing is that the CPU seems to have nothing to do
and RAM is also quite free, so there must be something with the NIC, but
I just cant figure out how to get some way to work around this.

I would appreciate a lot if anyone could give me tips of *any* kind, I'm
picking around in the dark all the time.. getting more and more
confused...

Help ! :)

Bye

Marcel