Persisting troubles with periodic stalls every few minutes

[Gavin Atkinson]

On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 02:36 +0100, Bartosz Fabianowski wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> I have been having a lot of trouble with performance on my laptop, which 
> I first set up with 5.3-RELEASE and constantly keep up to date with 
> 5.3-STABLE. The box runs stable, but periodically, somewhere between 
> every few minutes down to every few seconds, it stalls for 5 seconds. By 
> that I mean that the screen is not being refreshed and all keyboard 
> strokes go into some kind of buffer to get processed when the stall is 
> over. Some key strokes also get lost or reversed in order, which makes 
> this even more annoying.
> 
> The trouble is that I cannot figure out how to find the responsible 
> process. Tools such as top(1) update in one second intervals at best and 
> as there are no screen updates during the stall, so they produce nothing 
> useful. The only tool that gave me some kind of information was 
> systat(1). When I invoke "systat -vmstat 1", I see the following:

Try running top with the -q option, and/or pressing space (which causes
top to try and refresh immediately).  If you still can't get any screen
updates to happen during the freeze, try
	top -qbSs 1 -d max > /var/tmp/somefile

And look through the file to see if you can establish what was actually
happening at the time of the freeze.

Gavin