Considerations
There are many methods that hardware may use to increase the interrupt latency that can be tolerated. These include buffers, and flow control. For example, most network cards implement transmit and receive ring buffers, interrupt rate limiting, and hardware flow control. Buffers allow data to be stored until it can be transferred, and flow control allows the network card to pause communications without having to discard data if the buffer is full.
Modern hardware also implements interrupt rate limiting. This helps prevent interrupt storms or live lock by having the hardware wait a programmable minimum amount of time between each interrupt it generates. Interrupt rate limiting reduces the amount of time spent servicing interrupts, allowing the processor to spend more time doing useful work. Exceeding this time results in a soft (recoverable) or hard (non-recoverable) error.
Read more about this topic: Interrupt Latency