Strange pauses and cpu usage - FreeBSD 6.1

[Kris Kennaway]

On Sun, May 28, 2006 at 02:18:36AM +0200, Xavier Chantry wrote:
> On Sat, May 27, 2006 at 01:14:13AM +0100, Shawn wrote:
> > I'm having a strange problem with cpu usage with my Athlon XP. Every so
> > often there seems to be a pause where the system comes under heavy
> > load for no apparent reason. If xmms was playing then I get a buzz sound
> > and the mouse pointer stops just for a split second, the same with
> > mplayer and vlc. Using Opera or firefox also seems to have a strange
> > effect where the mouse pointer freezes while pages load, and if there
> > is an animated gif on the page the cpu usage goes to 100%.
> > 
> > The jabber client Gajim also makes the cpu get stuck at 100%. When I
> > used gnome, nautilus did the same thing until i stopped and started the
> > process in the system monitor. I have searched around and found this
> > tip from the handbook but it had no effect.
> > 
> > hint.apic.0.disabled="1" in /boot/loader.conf
> > 
> > This happens with the generic kernel and the one i compiled for myself.
> > It also lasts for a random amount of time, sometimes it is barely
> > noticeable and sometimes it happens for over a second. Running
> > neverwinter nights makes the system pause for 10-20 seconds seemingly
> > randomly.
> > 
> 
> My system behaves much better than that, I've no mouse freeze and no
> system pauses, but I did have occasonial sound skips using 4bsd on 6.1.
> Switching to the ULE scheduler seems to fix this problem, but other
> things may behave worse.
> One year ago, it was actually the opposite, sound in ULE was really
> jerky, and mouse pointer too while eg launching an app.
> Did you already try both schedulers ?

Check for interrupt sharing with vmstat -i.  Shared interrupts cause
performance loss especially if it's sharing with a giant-locked driver
like USB.

Kris
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