Strange behaviour

[Paul Goyette <paul%whooppee.com@localhost>]

The system: dual-12-core AMD Opteron-6172 (total 24 cores at 3.2GHz), 
and 32GB RAM.  (The motherboard is a ASUS KGPE-D16).

While running a 'build.sh -j48 release' I notice that there seems to be 
a rather excessive amount of "System Time".  Running systat(1) I can see 
long periods of 60% to 70% (or even more), while at no time do I ever 
get more than 15% to 20% of user time.  The only thing that seems to be 
running (according to vmstat) at many thousands of "Global TLB IPI" 
interrupts, although Interrupt time is mostly invisible.  (It never 
shows up more than 1% or 2% on systat, and a xosview never shows any 
interrupt time at all.)  Other than the 5K to 10K (with occassional 
bursts of 18K) TLB IPI, the only other interrupt activity is a few 
hundred disk interrupts, and maybe a few dozen network interrupts.

Is this expected behavior?


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