[linux-elitists] Dual bore - a question on diagnosis

[Phil Mayers]

Bah!

I freely admit to having reached the limit of my elitist abilities here, 
but was idly wondering if I'm literally the only person who has this 
problem...

My brand new dual-core i965/ICH8 system suffers from some kind of 
sporadic molasses effect. I am hypothesising something related to the 
cpufreq stuff or the scheduler is playing havoc with it.

Weirdly, the effect seems to be triggered by periods of light load.

I've tried a number of things, prominently amongst them:

echo performance >/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/cpufreq/scaling_governor

...but a whole slew of kernel boot options too.

Now, if someone just happened to have the answer I'd be grateful, but 
what I really want is to improve my mad skillz </irony>.

Anybody know where I can find info on how to go about even starting 
diagnosis?  One assumes that various diagnostic options and/or /sys or 
/proc files exist that I could inspect when the slowdowns occur to try 
and peg the cause.