On Tue Aug 17 1999 at 21:53:13 +0000, Matthias Scheler wrote:

> > 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).

I remember getting it on a 32MB box when I was using wdc, so I guess it
wouldn't be directly related to either of the above causes.

   -Antti