Hi Reuben,

>When using X the computer freezes every thirty seconds or so for a second
>or two. It seems to access the disk. Is this paging of some sort going on?
>Why the freeze? Is there any way I can stop it?

The freeze you see every 30 seconds is the disc cacheing ensuring that
the disk is in sync with the cache, ie there are no dirty blocks of
data.
It needs to occur, otherwise if the machine crashed with a significant
amount
of unwritten data, you will get nasty problems.

>I'm using the snapshot kernel of March 11th (that's so that I can get my
>EtherH card to work) on an SA RPC.

I think the new cache cleaning code was introduced or patched recently.

Thanks,
Daniel Blueman