wine users - Oct 2010 - System Stutters/Skips with wine Under Load

Hello.  I am hoping someone can help with a problem I am having.  I am running
the Windows folding at home client through wine.  This app is very load
intensive and performs many scientific calculations.  It consumes 100% of all
six cores in my system.  However, I run it with a "nice" level of 19
so that it only uses idle cycles.

Unfortunately, with this setup, my system consistently stutters or skips at
random intervals (several times per minute).  These micro-stutters cause my
mouse to stop moving and media to stop playing, etc.  The whole system freezes
for a fraction of a second each time.

I do not believe the Folding at home client itself is responsible since the
problem does not occur on Windows with the same executable.  I have tried wine
1.2.1 and 1.3.5 on Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 with the same results.  No other
program on my system - even other load intensive applications - cause this
issue.

I am happy to provide any other additional information that would be helpful. 
This is very annoying and hinders my normal work.  Any help is greatly
appreciated!

klaxian wrote:
> Unfortunately, with this setup, my system consistently stutters or skips at
random intervals (several times per minute).  These micro-stutters cause my
mouse to stop moving and media to stop playing, etc.  The whole system freezes
for a fraction of a second each time.
Ask your distro on howto change default scheduler.

See current discussion on /.
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/10/10/23/1828251/The-State-of-Linux-IO-Scheduling-For-the-Desktop

vitamin wrote:
> 
> klaxian wrote:
> > I agree that the state of both could be better on Linux, but I am
still unsure how that could affect my situation.  Under no circumstances should
the entire system stutter like this :)
> 
> Wine is a 100% user space program. By definition it can not cause the
problem you experiencing. Ask on your distro support forum for help.

You are right of course.  I was just looking for a place to start.  I will
pursue this with Ubuntu.  Thanks.