> Now that I've had a chance to really examine the system, I'm noticing a
> rather high interrupt count (1584), and I'm not exactly sure how to figure
> out what's triggering them.

i set HZ=1000.  so that accounts for 1000 of them.  i've also modified
/dev/irqalloc to count up the interrupts, so you should get a rough idea
of which irqs are responsible.  i say rough because chaned interrupts
can confuse the matter a bit.

> I did not install venti.  I just configured my ip address for DHCP, and I've
> got aux/timesync running (I think that was suspect before for some reason).
>  Stats shows interrupts as a solid rectangle of activity all the time.

i get that too from stats.  it's just tuned to HZ=100.  the reason for the
increase is so that millisecond sleeps can work a bit better.  on all the
systems i use, the overhead is not worth worring about.

- erik