We have a pc (IBM ThinkCentre P4 HT 1G mem) on which we had suse 9.0 running. We had no problems.
I upgraded the system to suse 9.3.
At first it seemed to work well, but after a certain period the system becomes very very slow.

Strange things happen with the system clock. It seems to go backwards at times.

I put in an exerpt from the console

sudx7876:~ # date
do feb 9 08:09:12 CET 2006
sudx7876:~ # date
do feb 9 08:09:13 CET 2006
sudx7876:~ # date
do feb 9 08:09:13 CET 2006
sudx7876:~ # date
do feb 9 08:09:16 CET 2006
sudx7876:~ # date
do feb 9 08:09:15 CET 2006
sudx7876:~ # date
do feb 9 08:09:15 CET 2006
sudx7876:~ # date
do feb 9 08:09:14 CET 2006
sudx7876:~ # date
do feb 9 08:09:19 CET 2006
sudx7876:~ # date
do feb 9 08:09:17 CET 2006
sudx7876:~ # date
do feb 9 08:09:19 CET 2006
sudx7876:~ # date
do feb 9 08:09:21 CET 2006
sudx7876:~ # date
do feb 9 08:09:18 CET 2006
sudx7876:~ # date
do feb 9 08:09:19 CET 2006
sudx7876:~ #

What is happening, and what can I do about it??

The clock issues I haven't seen commonly, but I have seen them. There are kernel patches out to fix that(from kernel.org, it is a kernel issue, not a SuSE issue).

For some, it was a precosser clock speed issue which caused the mis-synching with the kernel timers which messed up the clock. Usually I see it going forward too much though.

Anywho, I would start with a kernel upgrade and see what happens from there.

Thanks for the suggestion.
I have never built a kernel so that would be a first.
But I think I have got a solution.
It is possible to enter boot parameters in the grub bootloaderscreen.
I entered 'acpi=oldboot'

Until now the system is stable.
I will keep you updated.

Thanks.

Good luck with that.

The system is still running good.

I have no experiance at all in upgrading kernels so I rest this issue at this point.

I thank everyone for their concerns.

We also experienced this wiered phenomena on servers, but it happened only on AMD processors and not INTELL ones (Xeons worked fine, and opterons single or dual core failed).
The funny thing is that it happened only with SuSE 9 (kernel 2.6) and not with SuSE 8.
We have learned that what has changed was tha ACPI (Advanced Control and Power Interface) was inserted into 2.6 kernel and activated by default.
Since ACPI is very much dependant on the BIOS (we have HP blades BL20, BL25), it can misbehave if the BIOS does not fully support it.
Apparently on servers with INTEL chips the bios fully supports it (hey - it's an INTEL standard...) and on BL25 where we have opterons the clock went backwards and forward.
We did the same as the above : we set acpi=off at boot time to completely disable acpi and now all is working fine on all our servers.