[Bug 665796] Re: Timer interrupt freezes, system becomes sluggish

[JRavasi]

It happens without any apparent cause to me too, even with the system is
idle.

It just appears that under normal operation, it happens 2-4 times a day
(completely random, no fixed interval between events); but if I start
playing Portal, for example, it happens in less than 30 mins (again, at
random, no defined interval).

Switching terminals also takes 10-15 seconds for me, and htop from the
console also shows the same unresponsiveness. Shaking the mouse
vigorously or flood-pinging from another machine alleviates the problem
until it goes away (it makes sense: they produce interrupts that wake
the process scheduler; this also explains the high system CPU usage: the
scheduler never awakes for normal ticks since there is no timer, but it
awakes to process hardware interrupts).

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Timer interrupt freezes, system becomes sluggish
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/665796
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