unreasonable reponse instability (sparc?)

[Noah McNallie <n0ah%n0ah.org@localhost>]

i'm still in hopes of finding reasons to absolutely love netbsd, even if 
i can't code device drivers i can at least love it!

not much of a setup here, living at a group home and have an sun sultra 
30 300Mhz 2MB L2 sparcv9 512MB machine that i tend to play with when i'm 
not sleeping my life away! Enough with it, a couple issues having to do 
with response:

- already noted once a few days, when under (mostly hd io as it would 
seem) load by 'nice -n 20 tar -zxvf gnusrc.tgz' (or the equiavelent 
which would make sense) commands seemed very unresponsive, such that 
running 'ulimit' would take a few seconds and would then again the next 
time! as if there where no command cache, maybe i'm crazy or maybe it's 
sparc but has anyone else experienced this?

- this last time i had it installed (i swap alot of os's often, 
comparing features, stability, load, response, etc.. nothing but time!) 
i did a 'nice -n 20 ./configure' for some piece of software, don't 
remember which,  and while watching a ping set on 8.8.8.8 or somewhat, 
it jumped all over, at least doubled quite often. tested repeatedly.

this could be sparc, or i could be crazy, but has anyone else noticed 
anything such as this? i'm a big response/latency freak

i absolutely love (and hope to continue loving) netbsd, maybe someone 
has experienced this and can confirm it or has an idea what i'm 
experiencing.

n0ah