Re: FreeBSD's problems as seen by the BSDForen.de community

> Anyway, the general description is the following: during a portupgrade the
> system response time goes up to several seconds or even minutes during a
> portupgrade. Imagine writing an email and having to wait a minute for your
> typing to show up. Needless to say, that using a mouse is impossible.
> This effect how ever is, though best seen there, not limited to X. Ping
> times to an affected system doing a portupgrade also go up to several
> seconds (over a cross cable).
>
> What I need now is someone to tell me, what to do in order to track the
> reasons down. It has recently been brought to my attention that there is a
> tool for creating scheduler traces, which I might ask people to collect,
> but my unqualified opinion is that it's an interrupt handling problem.

Yes, I bet you incurred in what's called a "interrupt storm". Asus M2N-E
(and similar) had similar problems in both RELENG_6 and RELENG_7 until the
end of 2006. Output of 'vmstat -i' whould prove it.

You may try to alleviate it by moving PCI cards to different slots, or
removing them altogether.

I can't help you solving it, though :(

Angelo