[techtalk] Re: Hardware Interrupts?
- From: Thomas Hurst <tom.hurst@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: techtalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2008 21:03:34 +0000
* Paul Ferguson (paul@xxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
>> My machine here was running pretty slowly and very unsteadily (sound
>> was not pretty!), even after a clean boot - fired up Process Explorer
>> and it's claiming 'Hardware Interrupts' are using anything up to 85%
>> CPU time. Any ideas what's gone wrong?
>
> Some info here:
> http://frazzleddad.blogspot.com/2006/03/lousy-performance-high-hardware.html
>
> Seems like IDE drivers are very often the cause of this issue
Specifically, Windows drops ATA drives into PIO mode after a fixed
number of DMA errors, and keeps them there until you remove the device
from device manager and restart so it redetects and resets the counter.
That the counter's incrementing at all could be a sign of a hardware
issue; controller bugs are quite common, though Windows rarely pushes
hard enough to encounter them, driver updates can include important
workarounds. The same goes for motherboard chipsets.
Cable problems can cause them; if you're using some ancient mangled or
rounded ribbon cable now might be a good time to replace it.
Overheating can cause it too. Either way, it needs to be resolved or
it'll probably keep happening, and not fixing it could lead to data
corruption.
Of course the high interrupt load should only happen during IO. If it's
constant, further investigation's called for. Does Process Explorer
show what kernel threads are using the CPU, or provide rate information
for IRQs?
--
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst
http://hur.st/
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