Thor Lancelot Simon writes:
> 
> I just discovered that myself.  Now it starts to make a lot more sense to
> me that using LFS magically makes the problem go away.
> 
> Have we both arrived at the hypothesis that, sometime between the 
> introduction of the pciide code in mid-1.3, and 1.4, the filesystem code
> was broken so as to cause this problem on some systems (long hangs under 
> heavy I/O load)?
> 
> Again I'd suspect disksort but LFS seems to feed the strategy routines just
> like FFS does so...

FWIW, I have seen this type of behavior on a server at home.  It is a
PII-400 with 128MB, and a single 20GB UDMA/33 EIDE.  I will try to test it
some more when I get home.  What I have seen pretty much what you guys
have been describing, under certain loads (cleandir/sup/cvs??) I can barely
do a 'ls -l' or similar in a reasonable time.
This behavior is what makes my SparcStation 10 @36Mhz sometimes seem "snappy"
compared to my PII-400 box.  Even with similar activities on the sparc,
I can at leaste get 'ls -l' to respond quickly.

At the moment I can't seem to trigger this on my machines though. :(

-Andrew
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew Gillham                            | This space left blank
gillham@whirlpool.com                     | inadvertently.
I speak for myself, not for my employer.  | Contact the publisher.