Re: Odd performance problem (hitching)

On  8 Sep, Daniel O'Connor wrote:

> It seems to only happen in X, but it does happen to another guy at work with 
> totally different hardware so I don't think it is X per se - perhaps just 
> that I only open enough files when in X to test it.

That could be an important clue.  Maybe one of the X apps that you are
running, like your mail reader, browser, or system status monitor.  Try
running X with one of the lightweight window managers and just an xterm
or two.

The 10 second interval doesn't make it sound like the problem is any of
the built in kernel tasks.  It's more consistent with something that
runs every 10 seconds in userland that monopolizes some kernel resource
whenever it runs.