Bill Stouder-Studenmund <wrstuden@netbsd.org> wrote:
> Pay attention to the ones not in "vnlock". Processes in "vnlock" are 
> sleeping, waiting on a vnode lock. They thus aren't directly consuming 
> CPU. You really want to know what the vnode lock holder is doing while 
> this is happening.

When i've noticed it in top, 3-4 of the total 4 nfsds were in vnlock.

Would they appear to be using a lot of CPU if it's a spin lock?

> I'm going to blame softdeps. Can you try things w/o them?

Will do, as time permits.

> 
> >  The system seems to recover, but i have noticed some of the recorded
> > programs  have lost substantial chunks of data, though that could
> > also be due to many other factors, such as antenna reception.
> 
> Some sort of cleanup is happening and gobbling lots of CPU.

 Yeah, the notion i had is that the recording software buffers some, but
then just starts dropping data as the writes queue.