strange cvs problem during mass checkout

[Voigtlaender]

Dear list,

I need some help.

Recently I have migrated a CVS from an ancient Sun E450 running Solaris 
8 to  Linux (debian lenny) running in a VI3 Virtual Machine.

I have to admit that I am not a cvs-expert at all, I just inheritted the 
system from a former colleague.

I tried the cvs from the distro first, but as we are stuck with an old 
version of an app-server as well as with an old Development Environment 
I had to downgrade to 1.11.5 build from source.

Run's fine except with one strange effect:

When the developers are using the automatic build environment (AFAIK 
cruisecontrol) the build failes during the checkout (which is compared 
with the normal usage a mass checkout as the whole project is transfered).

The failure is not predictable and occurance is irregular.

Desperate for some more logging I fired up strace which put a lot of 
load on the machine and now comes the funny part: The build process 
completed successfully. Stopped strace, build failure, fired strace up 
again, build runs fine.

To refine this a bit more a have reduced the Ressources the VM is 
allowed to use to almost nothing (CPU Limit at 333MHz) and reniced the 
inetd and therefore the spawned cvs processes with the lowest prio possible.

Now the build runs fine even without the strace.

Although I am glad that this is working again I am not really happy with 
the workaround.

Could somebody please confirm that this is sort of predictable behaviour 
with this version (1.11.5). Is there any other fix except upgrading? (I 
would love to upgrade, but I cant - see above).

Thanks in advance

Hendrik