nfe0 loses network connectivity (8.0-RELEASE-p2)

I have a machine with FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-p2 which has a big ZFS file
system and serves as file server (NFS (newnfs)).

From time to time however it seems to lose all network connectivity. The
machine isn't down; from the console (an IPMI console) it works fine.

I have tried things like bringing nfe0 down and up again, turning off
things like checksum offload, and none of them really seem to work
(although apparently sometimes by accident, a thing I try seems to help,
but a short time later connectivity is lost again).

Carrier status and things like that seem all normal:

nfe0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=19b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4>
ether 00:30:48:xx:xx:xx
inet 131.174.xx.xx netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 131.174.xx.xxx
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
status: active

One time when I was doing an "ifconfig nfe0 up" I got the message
"initialization failed: no memory for rx buffers", so I am currently
thinking in the direction of mbuf starvation (with something requiring
too many mbufs to make any progress; I've seen such a thing with inodes
once).

Here is the output of netstat -m while the problem was going on:

25751/1774/27525 mbufs in use (current/cache/total)
24985/615/25600/25600 mbuf clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
23254/532 mbuf+clusters out of packet secondary zone in use (current/cache)
0/95/95/12800 4k (page size) jumbo clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
0/0/0/6400 9k jumbo clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
0/0/0/3200 16k jumbo clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
56407K/2053K/58461K bytes allocated to network (current/cache/total)
0/2084/1031 requests for mbufs denied (mbufs/clusters/mbuf+clusters)
0/0/0 requests for jumbo clusters denied (4k/9k/16k)
0/0/0 sfbufs in use (current/peak/max)
0 requests for sfbufs denied
0 requests for sfbufs delayed
10 requests for I/O initiated by sendfile
0 calls to protocol drain routines

while here are the figures a short time after a reboot (a reboot always
"fixes" the problem):

2133/2352/4485 mbufs in use (current/cache/total)
1353/2205/3558/25600 mbuf clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
409/871 mbuf+clusters out of packet secondary zone in use (current/cache)
0/35/35/12800 4k (page size) jumbo clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
0/0/0/6400 9k jumbo clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
0/0/0/3200 16k jumbo clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
3239K/5138K/8377K bytes allocated to network (current/cache/total)
0/0/0 requests for mbufs denied (mbufs/clusters/mbuf+clusters)
0/0/0 requests for jumbo clusters denied (4k/9k/16k)
0/0/0 sfbufs in use (current/peak/max)
0 requests for sfbufs denied
0 requests for sfbufs delayed
0 requests for I/O initiated by sendfile
0 calls to protocol drain routines

Is there a way to increase the maximum number of mbufs, or better yet,
limit the use by whatever is using them too much?

Thanks in advance,
-Olaf.
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