I recently installed RH9 (Shrike - 2.4.80) on my machine and everything seems to be fine except that the machine will freeze periodically (every 10 to 15 seconds) for a few seconds (about 3 seconds). When this freeze happens, nothing works - mouse, keyboard, etc. Then the machine will be just fine for the next 10-15 seconds and then repeat the same thing.

I ran System Monitor to check the CPU load and sure enough, the CPU load spikes pretty high (between 80% and 100%) when this freeze occurs. It is as if something in the kernel or a high priority application just takes over the machine for a few seconds.

My machine is setup for dual boot using Grub with Win XP. Here is my basic hardware:

Pentium 4 1.6 Ghz
Asus P4B motherboard
Geforce2 MX graphics card
Kingston RAM (768MB)
WD hard drives
Linksys LNE100TX NIC
Adaptec 2906 SCSI adapter

Any help in diagnosing this problem would be much appreciated.