Many dropped packets on NIC

I've noticed a very large count of dropped packets in the NICs of some of my servers.

Have you seen something like this before? Any idea on what can be the problem?

Below there's some information that could be relevant to diagnose this issue.

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ifconfig eth0

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1C:C0:C0:EA:26
          inet addr:192.168.100.90  Bcast:192.168.100.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::21c:c0ff:fec0:26ea/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:613183643 errors:0 dropped:3745216480 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:591528174 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:2579582564 (2.4 GiB)  TX bytes:2103414697 (1.9 GiB)
          Interrupt:177 Base address:0x4000

lspci -nn

02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller [10ec:8168] (rev 03)

ethtool eth0

Settings for eth0:
        Supported ports: [ FIBRE ]
        Supported link modes:   1000baseT/Full
        Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
        Advertised link modes:  Not reported
        Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
        Speed: 1000Mb/s
        Duplex: Full
        Port: FIBRE
        PHYAD: 0
        Transceiver: internal
        Auto-negotiation: on
        Supports Wake-on: pumbg
        Wake-on: p
        Current message level: 0x00000033 (51)
        Link detected: yes

dmesg

r8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver 2.2LK-NAPI loaded
eth0: RTL8169 at 0xf8824000, 00:1c:c0:c0:ea:26, IRQ 177
r8169: eth0: link up
eth0: no IPv6 routers present

/proc/interrupts

           CPU0       CPU1
177:   13417368 1016623344   IO-APIC-level  eth0

More information:

• All servers are running Debian Lenny
• All the NICs showing this behaviour have the same PCI ID.

Unfortunately, there are many hits if you google the r8169 interface and "dropped packets"

One report said they fixed their issue with a newer driver from Realtek. Another match was a Redhat bug report which said it was fixed in a newer kernel. Hopefully that means it is fixed upstream as well. You could try a newer kernel from kernel.org and see if the issue is dealt with.