5.4-prerelease - hanging under load

[Matthias Buelow]

Emanuel Strobl wrote:

>Huh? I thought by default it is "HIGH", but it would also explain the 
>experiences in the thread "cpufreq related RELENG_5 regression" 
>(http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=389949+393881+/usr/local/www/db/text/2005/freebsd-stable/20050327.freebsd-stable)

But does that also affect desktop machines?  I'm not under the
impression that my CPU is running at a lower frequency.  The issue
I mentioned only seems to occur when doing larger block reads/writes
from/to disk (SATA), like untarring firefox.  I didn't notice it
so far when some kind of mixed disk access is going on, like with
find, compiling, etc.  Maybe that points to some locking issues in
the VM corner?  I mean, it's not dramatic, but still makes the
system appear a bit unpolished, when it happens.  In the past, with
pre-5.x releases, FreeBSD has been scheduling disk i/o and interactive
work smoothly, in my experience, so one didn't quite notice when
heavy disk access was going on, at least not if your interactive
programs weren't doing much disk i/o themselves.

mkb.