Strange pauses in 2.6.2-rc1 / AMD64

Aaron Mulder
2004-01-22T02:17:37Z

I tried out 2.6.2-rc1 today, and saw some very strange behavior
with Java. I run a 30s build process (Java/Ant), and it would basically
stop in the middle. If I run a "top" next to it (this was all in X),
during the pauses, the CPUs would go down to nearly 100% idle, and all the
Java processes disappeared from the top of the list. If I moved my mouse
at all, the Java build would wake up for a bit, then stop again 10 or 15
seconds later. The build would easily take several minutes if I didn't
move my mouse much (or hang indefinitely if I didn't move my mouse at
all). If I consistently jiggled my mouse through the entire build, the
performance was approximately what I would expect (35-40s).

I tried the same thing under my normal kernel (SuSE
2.4.21-178-smp) and the build ran continuously with no pauses (35s).

The pauses on 2.6.2-rc1 occured with both 32-bit (Sun) and 64-bit
(Blackdown) Java implementations.

I can't explain it, but if there's any pertinent info I can
provide, I'll be happy to.

Thanks,
Aaron

2x Opteron 248, Tyan Thunder K8W, 4GB RAM, SuSE 9.0 for AMD64