threads stuck w/ibm jre

[drewg]

i just updated my server from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04, and updated from a 4850e dual core to a x4 635 quad core. For the longest time, I've been running the IBM JRE because it had made the menus on my extender seem much more responsive, and had reduced glitching in recordings that I'd observed with the Sun JRE coincident with seeing the "spinny wheel" in the extender GUI.

Well.. today I noticed that SageTV had 2 out of control threads running (consuming 2 full cores, 100% CPU per thread). From strace, they seemed to be calling gettimeofday() hundreds of times per second, but making no other syscalls.

Suspecting that I might finally be having the sort of troubles that others have had with the IBM JRE, I grabbed the latest Sun / Oracle JRE 1.6.21. Something about either updating the OS, or updating the CPU, or using this latest JRE version has made the Sun JRE seem as responsive as the IBM JRE did, so I'm hoping I don't need the IBM JRE any more.

Drew