In article <199908172122.VAA17097@orchard.arlington.ma.us>,
	sommerfeld@orchard.arlington.ma.us (Bill Sommerfeld) writes:
> the behavior reported in this PR has been observed on multiple
> systems by multiple users (myself, Perry Metzger, Mattias Scheler)
> 
> During periods of heavy disk i/o to UDMA pciide drives, programs will
> periodically "freeze" for up to about 5 seconds and then start up
> again.

A few seconds ago I experienced this problem with a SCSI disk, too. It
happened while extracting a "tar" archive from a NFS filesystem to a
local filesystem on an UW SCSI disk. So it's obviously not related to
the PCI IDE driver.

I suppose it is more related to buffer management because all affected
boxes have lots of memory (either 128 or 256MB).

-- 
Matthias Scheler                            http://www.sighardstrasse.de/~tron/