On Sat, Oct 25, 2003 at 05:29:03PM +0200, jmmv@menta.net wrote:
> The highest is "pic0 pin 14" (all others seem to keep a somewhat constant

I guess this is the first pciide channel

> value).  When XMMS does pauses during playback, that interrupt is over 450
> (the maximun I've seen is probably 555, and this was unpacking system sets).
> (BTW, what do these numbers mean?)

The number of interrupts per second. 400 or 500 is normal for IDE activity
(abouve 1000 would probably mean there is an interrupt loop in the driver,
for example).

With the attached test program, I can drive my IDE drive to up to 800
interrupts per seconds on my celeron 500's piix4, and more than 1000
on a Promise Ultra133 in the same box, without effects on interractive use.
You can try it on your drive (./tst /dev/rwd0d 100000) and see if it causes
the symptoms you're seeing with filesystem activity.
You can also try
dd if=/dev/rwd0d of=/dev/null bs=64k
(this will cause data to be read from disk, as unlike my program which
should mostly do data read from the disk's cache), and
dd if=/dev/wd0d of=/dev/null bs=64k
which will cause data to be read though the data buffer cache, and so
load the system's VM as well.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 24 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--