emacs freezes

["Jose A. Ortega Ruiz" <jao@gnu.org>]

Hi. Since some time ago, my emacs freezes intermitently. That is, it
ceases to react to any keystroke and all frames become blank. There is
no CPU activity (top lists the emacs process as stopped). The only way
out is kill. If i attach strace to the process instance i got the
following trace continously:

Process 4067 attached - interrupt to quit
futex(0x407d9860, FUTEX_WAIT, 2, NULL)  = -1 EINTR (Interrupted system call)
--- SIGIO (I/O possible) @ 0 (0) ---
sigreturn()                             = ? (mask now [SEGV])

so it seems some kind of problem with the 'futex' syscall. I'm using
linux 2.6.8 (with the futex kernel config flag enabled) on a debian
sid. window manager is usually ion (but, iirc, it also happens with
pekwm and sawfish), and the freeze (almost?) always happen when
switching between emacs frames. i usually have separate emacs frames
with eshell, gnus and w3m, in case that matters.

i've tried both emacs 21.3.1 (the stock debian package) and the latest
cvs (21.3.50). same problem in both, but when using cvs + gtk2.0 the
frequency of the freeze increases dramatically from approx. once a day
(with 21.3.1 and xawd emacs cvs) to once every few minutes (with gtk).

any help would be greatly appreciated, since i spent 90% of my
computer time inside emacs :)

thanks,
jao
-- 
We shall do a much better programming job, provided we approach the
task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided
that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and
approach the task as very humble programmers. (Alan Turing)