[Gllug] CD ripping and interrupt congestion

[Rev Simon Rumble]

I've been ripping a bunch of CDs of late, in preparation for my CDR
mp3 player arriving next week.  I use the fantastic grip with its
integrated CD Paranoia and support of many many mp3 codecs.

The problem is that the ripping process really kills my machine.  ppp
activity drops to zero and every other process ends up taking heaps
longer.  The usual 2.5x speed I get in the mp3 codec process drops to
less that .5x while ripping is going on.

The problem, I suspect, is my ATAPI CD-ROM drive.  It gives very good
performance, about 3x ripping speed with full paranoia.  But it seems
to kill my machine.  I suppose it must be generating mucho interrupts
during this process.

I have DMA switched on.  Here's the hdparm output:
/dev/cdrom:
 HDIO_GET_MULTCOUNT failed: Invalid argument
 I/O support  =  1 (32-bit)
 unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
 using_dma    =  1 (on)
 keepsettings =  1 (on)
 HDIO_GET_NOWERR failed: Invalid argument
 readonly     =  1 (on)
 readahead    =  8 (on)
 HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument

Is there anything I can do to make it nicer, even at the expense of
ripping speed?  Hopefully it doesn't involve buying SCSI which I know
tends to have less impact on the system.

Finally, does anyone know any fully integrated ripper-encoder-cddb
tools (GUI or CLI) which support multiple CD drives?  I have three and
would like to be able to set my machine up to encode three in a row
(serially is okay) when I leave the house.

-- 
Rev Simon Rumble <simon at rumble.net>
www.rumble.net

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