What does interrupt in eth0 mean?

Question

I wonder if "Interrupt" affects internet connection.

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 60:eb:69:6c:55:83  
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
          Interrupt:45 

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 4c:0f:6e:6c:d2:9f  
          inet addr:192.168.11.41  Bcast:192.168.11.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::4e0f:6eff:fe6c:d29f/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:159717 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:24945
          TX packets:155355 errors:40 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:224953980 (224.9 MB)  TX bytes:13688161 (13.6 MB)
          Interrupt:17 

Solution 1

In this case its most likely a dropped packet. Interrupts are how computers call fucntions at the CPU level. You load the registers and the stack and then generate an interrupt.
But if you really want to understand about interrupts, check out Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrupt

Solution 2

The interrupt refers to the interrupt number used by the network adapter. See the breakdown of ifconfig for more details.

Interrupt numbers are assigned to hardware devices by the kernel. They are used to multiplex the few interrupt channels that the CPU has between many hardware devices. You can see all interrupt numbers being used by executing cat /proc/interrupts/

Comments

[xofer]

This is incorrect. It's simply the IRQ number as stated by @Mowgli

[Brian Thomas]

@Ed Manet if you delete your answer you will get your points back..