Mac Pro pauses every 44 seconds

Hello all ...

I have an interesting issue here which Ive not seen before. Machine in question is a Late 2013 MacPro 3.5 GHz 6 Core E5 with 32GB ram, FirePro D300 and 500 GB Flash storage. I am using it to run some automation software called Switch from Enfocus - http://www.enfocus.com/en/ - which calls Adobe Photoshop and Acrobat to perform automated tasks.

What we have seen over the past weeks is the machine will pause for a specific amount of time and then "pause" then continue on for another specific amount of time. Yesterday I was seeing it run for approx 24 seconds then pause for approx 6 then repeat. Today after a reboot and some software updates the timing has changed to 44 seconds but still a pause of 6 seconds.

Everything pauses - the clock is the give-away as it counts then stops then jumps forward 6 seconds. Console pauses, top pauses, of course all the applications pause. And I can see no reason for it no errors that stand out ...

Anyone seen something like this before ? Ive been running different kinds of macs as servers for years and not seen this before - and I have seen some weird stuff !

Regards

Mitch