While transferring a slew of data to one of my Linux boxes a few weeks back, I was curious how many interrupts were being generated each second. To answer my question, I installed the itop utility. Itop displays the number of interrupts per second that occur per device, and provides output similar to top. Here is a sample run:
$ itop -a
INT NAME RATE MAX
0 [ timer] 0 Ints/s (max: 0)
1 [ i8042] 0 Ints/s (max: 0)
6 [ floppy] 0 Ints/s (max: 0)
7 [ parport0] 0 Ints/s (max: 0)
8 [ rtc0] 0 Ints/s (max: 0)
9 [ acpi] 0 Ints/s (max: 0)
12 [ i8042] 0 Ints/s (max: 0)
15 [ ide0] 0 Ints/s (max: 0)
16 [ ehci_hcd:usb2] 0 Ints/s (max: 0)
17 [ ioc0] 0 Ints/s (max: 24)
18 [ eth0] 1400 Ints/s (max: 1959)
19 [ uhci_hcd:usb1, ] 0 Ints/s (max: 0)
This is a useful tool, and one I want to remember for the future!