Constant short stalls on 5-stable

[Bartosz Fabianowski]

Hi list,

I am having trouble with 5-stable on an Intel Centrino notebook. The 
system was installed from scratch using 5.3-release CDs and is updated 
every few days to the latest 5-stable. The output of uname -a is:

FreeBSD takahe.local 5.3-STABLE FreeBSD 5.3-STABLE #6: Fri Nov 19 
00:42:30 CET 2004     root at takahe.local:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/TAKAHE  i386

It's running as a desktop with xorg and KDE 3.3.1. The /usr/home 
partition is GBDE encrypted. Everything is working fine, but there are 
constant stalls. What I mean by that is that the machine will suddenly 
stop responding to any input. The mouse cursor will keep moving, but 
keyboard input will end up in a buffer somewhere and mouse clicks will 
get lost completely. After a second or two, everything comes back to 
normal. Characters typed during the stall come out of the buffer 
(although often in the wrong order and with some characters missing) and 
the system can be used again. A minute or two later, the next stall 
occurs. Needless to say, this is very annoying.

I know that with such a vague description, probably nobody can help me. 
But maybe someone has a debugging tip for me. Where should I look? How 
can I see what is hogging up the CPU or some other important system 
resource during a stall?

- Bartosz