wired PPP problem: ppp connection fail, slow down on FreeBSD but fine on Windows

The FreeBSD gateway machine has one end connect to ADSL modem through
pppoe, the other connects to LAN and act as NAT gateway.

PPP connection can be established correctly, then after 5 hour or 10
hour, connection speed become very slow or (more frequently) simply
cannot connect (a.k.a. browsing web pages time out). Then, ping from LAN
client hosts to external network would simply timeout, ping from NAT
gateway to 10.10.10.5 (that's the other end of the PPPOE connection)
keep getting this message:
ping: send to: No buffer space available
At the same time, top(1) shows 80~95 CPU resource is taken by
'interrupt'.

stop ppp by "/etc/rc.d/ppp stop" and re-start this process usually will
not get re-connected (/var/log/ppp.log is like 'carrier -> stop ->
redial', that is we don't reach the step of login). Reboot computer
usually also do not help. After fighting the problem for an hour or so,
suddenly it (pppoe) become working again.

Sometimes, connection become very slow, ping from NAT gateway to
10.10.10.5 gets half of packets dropped (lost) and the other half has a
ping delay of 500ms (usually it should be less then 50 ms).

This problem is no longer observed after we installed Windows 2000
Professional on the gateway as second OS and use it for PPP/NAT.

This problem has troubled me for two weeks and really exhausted me. In
the begining we had a Linux network gateway machine, a Pentium-MMX box
that has been running fine for almost a year. At 3 weeks ago it become
very unstable, have similar behaviour as described above (only that a
process called "events" take up 80~95 CPU resource rather then
"interrupt"). We replaced it with a Pentium II (300MHz) machine with
FreeBSD and got the behaviour described above.

When we replace OS from Linux to FreeBSD, we actually replaced the
gateway with another machine (including its network cards), so I think
chance of network card problem / gateway hardware problem should be very
small.

Can you provide some suggestions on how to further find out and fix this
problem?

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