Changing the IRQ coalesce settings
does improve the ping times noticeably on Intel hardware,
but your 4-5 ms peak ping time indicates other issues, likely related to power management.
My system with Intel MAC and default IRQ coalesce settings:
PING 10.10.10.10 (10.10.10.10) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.10.10.10: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.316 ms
64 bytes from 10.10.10.10: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.250 ms
64 bytes from 10.10.10.10: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.251 ms
64 bytes from 10.10.10.10: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.250 ms
Same system with IRQ coalecing off:
PING 10.10.10.10 (10.10.10.10) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.10.10.10: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.116 ms
64 bytes from 10.10.10.10: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.106 ms
64 bytes from 10.10.10.10: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.107 ms
64 bytes from 10.10.10.10: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.106 ms
Have you disabled all power management in the system BIOS and grub?
Have you set isolcpus to the last CPU in the grub file?
Do you have idle=poll in the grub file as well?
(These are basic latency reducing steps for
any LinuxCNC host)
linuxcnc.org/docs/html/install/latency-test.html