[Sussex] Curious problem - sound related ???

[Stephen Williams]

On Tue, 2006-04-18 at 21:14 +0100, 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
> 
> 

John,

Here are some typical values from my install (Gentoo - what else)
running amaroK. These are a few values sampled at 1 sec intervals. Note
the resource usage is a lot less than yours.

                       CPU% MEM%

13379     1   1:05.93  7.9  4.3  15   0 S  139m  96m  42m 1000 amarokapp
13379     1   1:06.01  7.9  4.3  16   0 R  139m  96m  42m 1000 amarokapp
13379     1   1:06.09  7.9  4.3  16   0 S  139m  96m  42m 1000 amarokapp
13379     1   1:06.16  6.9  4.3  15   0 S  139m  96m  42m 1000 amarokapp
13379     1   1:06.24  7.9  4.3  16   0 S  139m  96m  42m 1000 amarokapp
13379     1   1:06.32  7.9  4.3  16   0 S  139m  96m  42m 1000 amarokapp
13379     1   1:06.41  8.9  4.3  16   0 R  139m  96m  42m 1000 amarokapp
13379     1   1:06.52 10.9  4.3  15   0 S  139m  96m  42m 1000 amarokapp
13379     1   1:06.61  8.9  4.3  16   0 R  139m  96m  42m 1000 amarokapp
13379     1   1:06.69  7.9  4.3  16   0 S  139m  96m  42m 1000 amarokapp

CPU rarely goes above 10% and memory rarely exceeds 5%. No skipping at
all. A few thoughts occur:

1. Try running amaroK using the Xine engine as opposed to the arts
engine - see if there's a difference.

2. You could run artswrapper suid, but this is a security risk.

3. Otherwise there mat be some problem with memory management. Something
wrong with they way your amaroK is compiled?

Steve W.

> 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.    
> 
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