Strange Bursts of Gtime Syscall

[Jason J. W. Williams]

Hello,

I've got a strange issue and was curious if anyone might be able to
shed some light on the issue. About 2-3 times an hour (not
predictable) we see huge bursts of syscall behavior (150,000-200,000
over a 2 second interval). This is on MySQL-5.1.14 on a Solaris 10
AMD64 box.

Using DTrace we've identified that the system call being invoked is
gtime and its being called on an INSERT. The bizarre thing is we don't
have a high number of INSERTs being shown in SHOW PROCESSLIST. I've
included the backtrace around the function that's calling gtime. Any
advise is greatly appreciated.

              libc.so.1`__time+0xa
              mysqld`_Z17mysql_lock_tablesP3THDPP8st_tablejjPb+0x2ab
              mysqld`_Z11lock_tablesP3THDP13st_table_listjPb+0x1c2
              mysqld`_Z20open_and_lock_tablesP3THDP13st_table_list+0x6a
             
mysqld`_Z12mysql_insertP3THDP13st_table_listR4ListI4ItemERS3_IS5_ES6_S6_15enum_duplicatesb+0x246
              mysqld`_Z21mysql_execute_commandP3THD+0x2191
              mysqld`_Z11mysql_parseP3THDPcj+0x168
              mysqld`_Z16dispatch_command19enum_server_commandP3THDPcj+0x7d3
              mysqld`_Z10do_commandP3THD+0x1e1
              mysqld`handle_one_connection+0x2e4
              libc.so.1`_thr_setup+0x67
              libc.so.1`_lwp_start

Best Regards,
Jason