I'm still trying to track down the cause of my nightmare.

To briefly recap, if I have "a few" Java threads,
and they shell out, I get woeful performance,
and massive idle time (as show by top).

I have found (RTFM!) a wondrous tool call plockstat,
and it appears that I have some kind of lock contention
issue.

However, the output of plockstat is very difficult
(for me) to understand.

I *think* I'm getting a summary for every process,
which since I'm shelling, means a lot of stuff.

For example, on a run where I have 8 threads each trying
to do 25 shell outs, I get 222 "Mutex block" headings
in my plockstat file.

Any help in interpreting this file and/or
analysing my contention issue would be gratefully
received.

  BugBear