[ltp] a30 performance issue (related to ethernet?)

[Richard Neill]

> Occasionally my a30 becomes really unresponsive for 1-3 minutes at a
>  time.  Symptoms include really laggy mouse movement, chocked IO, 
> unresponsive  apps, etc. but the CPU usage is always low. It seems to
>  have something to  do with the built-in ethernet device, because 
> bringing down the network  interface (eth0) fixes everything 
> immediately. This kernel message is  scattered all over my logs:
> 
> "e100: eth0: e100_watchdog: link up, 10Mbps, half-duplex"
>
This reminds me of an issue I had with the A22p dropping the network 
every few minutes. My fix was to remove the e100 module (which is 
deprecated, and iirc unmaintained + buggy) and use the eepro100 module 
instead. Does that help?  If it does, then add it to modprobe.preload.

Incidentally, I'd guess that the problem is some sort of interrupt 
"storm". Look at /proc/interrupts and see whether you are getting a vast 
number on that device.

Richard