Re: Strange pauses and cpu usage - FreeBSD 6.1

On Sun, 28 May 2006 01:02:35 -0400
Kris Kennaway <kris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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

I tried switching to ULE and while the sound skipping seems to have
stopped, the other problems remain.

vmstat -i gives me:

interrupt total rate
irq0: clk 69873 984
irq7: ppc0 2 0
irq8: rtc 8944 125
irq10: atapci0++ 2409 33
irq11: nvidia0++ 5264 74
irq12: pcm0 rl0+ 41 0
irq15: ata1 47 0
Total 86580 1219

So it seems that net and sound are sharing irq12, and just before i
see the freeBSD bootloader i can see that irq12 is used for the usb
controller. Is this my problem? I have no irq settings in the
BIOS and i tried a device hint for pcm to move it up to irq13 but had no
luck.

Forgive me if I am missing something obvious somewhere along the line,
I only started using freeBSD a few weeks ago and I am totally new to
BSD in general.

Thanks for the help!

~shawn
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