Why is intr taking up so much cpu?

[Doug Barton]

On Sat, 17 Jul 2010, Rui Paulo wrote:

>
> On 17 Jul 2010, at 08:17, Doug Barton wrote:
>
>> This is happening after I open a flash video in firefox and watch it for
>>> 15 minutes:
>>
>> root   20 -80    -     0K   160K WAIT    0   3:38 14.08% intr
>>
>> After this happens, my system goes into a death spiral and I have to shut it down.
>>
>> vmstat -i
>> interrupt                          total       rate
>> irq1: atkbd0                       10384          0
>> irq9: acpi0                            5          0
>> irq14: ata0                       153410          7
>> irq15: ata1                           58          0
>> irq17: wpi0                       534038         27
>> irq20: hpet0 uhci0+              2496833        129
>> irq22: uhci2                       66485          3
>> cpu0:timer                      19238037        999
>> irq256: hdac0                     189713          9
>> cpu1:timer                      19236431        999
>> Total                           41925394       2178
>>
>>
>> Any suggestions?  current (r210135), i386 smp. Dell C2D laptop.
>
> What's vmstat -i before the event happens?

Here is the output after a clean boot:

interrupt                          total       rate
irq1: atkbd0                         424          4
irq9: acpi0                            2          0
irq14: ata0                         3266         30
irq15: ata1                           58          0
irq17: wpi0                         2012         18
irq20: hpet0 uhci0+                13763        129
irq22: uhci2                          16          0
cpu0:timer                        105150        991
irq256: hdac0                         10          0
cpu1:timer                        103716        978
Total                             228417       2154

Thanks for the response,

Doug

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