RELENG_7 2008/01/10 desktop system also periodically freezes

[David G Lawrence]

> On Fri, 11 Jan 2008 12:49:29 -0500, I wrote:
> >
> > I have yet to experience a "random" freeze not directly attributable
> > to a softupdate while running the lock profiling.  I am running with
> > lock profiling on, and resetting the profiling counters once a minute.
> > Yesterday and this morning, I've run for quite a while now with lock
> > profiling on but without a "random" freeze.  I'll wait some more, but
> > I'm hoping that enabling the lock profiling hasn't masked the freeze.
> > I'll post again when I see one..
> > 
> 
> It is looking more likely to me that enabling lock profiling does mask
> the freeze.  I ran for more than 10 hours yesterday with lock profiling
> enabled and did not observe a single freeze.  After about 7 hours, I
> stopped the lock profiling and within 20 mins or so, I experienced a
> NINE MINUTE freeze!!  On re-enabling the lock profiling, I ran for about
> 3 more hours with no further freezes.
> 
> At the time of that long freeze, all I was doing was typing an email
> message.  The load average was almost 0.  Mail client is claws-email.
> Also running but idle were firefox, ical, several xterms, fvwm & its
> children (Fvwm{Buttons,Event,Pager,IconMan}), xload and xclock.  And
> xorg which uses the xf86-video-intel driver.  Daemons running were
> wpa_supplicant, dhclient, devd, syslogd, cupsd, ntpd, powerd, sshd,
> sendmail, cron, moused and xdm.  That is all.

   You might want to try disabling powerd and see if that mitigates the
problem. powerd is going to be messing with the CPU clock when it is near
idle. Your system would be less idle with lock profiling enabled, which
might explain why the problem seems to happen less often in that case.
 
-DG

David G. Lawrence
President
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