[Sussex] Curious problem - sound related ???

[John D.]

On Tuesday 18 April 2006 10:05, Stephen Williams wrote:
> John,
>
> Before you start playing a CD or Amarok, open a terminal window and run
> top. Leave it where you can see it, then play your CD or run Amarok.
> When the skipping starts, see if there are any processes hoggigng CPU
> cycles. If there is some sort of file indexing service running in the
> background, this can cause problems. It certainly does in Windows.
>
> Steve W.
Ok, did that Steve. 

Now I don't entirely understand the output, but below shows what I managed to 
copy (little bugger for copying!) after about 30 or so seconds of playing a 
file with amorak

top - 21:08:39 up 11 min,  1 user,  load average: 1.19, 0.62, 0.35
Tasks:  89 total,   1 running,  88 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 63.8% us, 34.9% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.3% hi,  1.0% si
Mem:    775504k total,   591876k used,   183628k free,    92864k buffers
Swap:  1469936k total,        0k used,  1469936k free,   197724k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 4855 john      15   0  176m 141m  24m S 94.5 18.7   0:43.64 amarokapp
 4415 john      15   0 53192  13m  10m S  3.0  1.8   0:02.86 artsd
 3756 root      15   0 95684  25m 4664 S  2.3  3.4   0:12.76 X
 4467 john      15   0 28960  15m  12m S  0.3  2.1   0:00.89 konsole


After a couple of minutes or so, the cpu % dropped to about 50% but the memory 
% continued to climb until it started skipping it got to well over 90%

I'm presuming that I would be correct to think that thats no a good sign.

If that presumption is correct, would you have any idea as to what I could do 
about it?

regards

John D.