Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

Some while ago, I wrote:

[
mplayer stutters when I/O is going on, even hangs for seconds when I do a
dd if=/dev/zero of=somefile bs=1M
]

> Urs Schutz writes:
> 
> > Just an idea: Is the disk OK? Replace /dev/sda with your
> > disk...
[...]
> > I had a bad disk here, which resulted in slow IO, but not
> > complete failure. Smart detected this immediately. Sorry,
> > I do not know how to check disks with LVM.
> 
> Didn't you get errors in yslog then?
> 
> I also thought about swapping the system drive - I have a larger backup 
> drive, with nearly identical logical volumes on it, where I make
> backups with rdiffbackup. So even the content is identical, except for
> an additional rdiff-backup directory containing the increments. So all
> I have to do is to echange the two volume group names, reboot, and the
> system will run from the other drive. But I very much doubt this will
> help, transfer speed looks okay to me, around 100 MB/s with dd.

I did it in another way. I created a large file system (LVM) on my 2nd
drive, copied /, /usr, /var, /opt and /home over. My whole system is
encrypted, but I omitted this, just to make sure this is not the
bottleneck.

Alas, no change. Another thing I tried was to change the SATA mode in my
BIOS from AHCI to whatever the other option is. This did not help either.

Now this is really annoying. I watch small clips mostly, and can live
with that, and when I want to watch stuff with others, I copy the file to
tmpfs, which seems to help a lot.

But now I found another solution: NOT USING KDE.

When X crashed (trying to make the old Unreal game play), I fired up
another window manager, and when I played a video in there, there was no
problem at all. So, I have another workaround.

But does anyone have an idea, why running KDE is the problem? Disabling
desktop effects does not help.

I must be totally crazy because I still want to use KDE, despite the big
trouble it gives me nearly every day. Yes, most things work fine now, but
there are many many little problems, daily application crashes, and every
time I log in I fear that the desktop won't come up. 8G of RAM was not
enough to avoid swapping, so now I have 16G, that's fine, I no longer
care about kwin using 1G of my RAM. Oh, and I no longer use KMail, after
it ate thousands of mails I just wanted to move. No problem, they were
not important, but I no longer trust the KDEPIM suite. And it seems the
developers do not care about this, the bug report got no replies.

But anyway. Any idea why it only happens with KDE? I will ask on the KDE
mailing list, but I thought I post here first, maybe there's something
Gentoo-specific going on here.

	Wonko