better network throughput with ISC 2.0.2

[Alan M. Carroll]

System: '386 with a 3C501 running ISC 2.0.2.
Problem: The network throughput is absolutely abysmal. On the order of
100 bytes
per second, or slower. Connections frequently timeout.

Comments: The machine is a 25 Mhz, with 16 Meg of memory, so it's not slow or
swapping. It seems to get an initial burst of 10-50 Kbytes right away (under a
second), and then get another few (1-4) Kbytes every minute or so. The Ether
card is configured on interrupt 2 (on the board) and 9 (in the sdevice file).
I've checked the crash/strstat stuff, and there have been _no_ allocation
failures, and the maximums (use) are all well under the maximums (allocated).
Netstat claims very few errors (3 out of ~120K packets), and few collisions
(11 of ~120K). By watching netstat, it looks like the driver is only sending/
receiving a couple of packets per second. This seems wrong. It's connecting to
other machines on the same physical cable, about 3 meters away, over thin ether
cable. Is this just the way it is, or is there something I can do? Thanks!