[Sussex] Curious problem - sound related ???

[David Morris]

John D. wrote:
> 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%
>   
If you memory usage got that high you might have problems with it trying 
to save it to swap.  Does amarokapp allow you to modify the memory size 
buffer that it uses, if so you could try lowering that.

> 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.    
>
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>   
Dave