From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([208.92.234.80] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1SRVFj-0007lL-Bu for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Mon, 07 May 2012 21:13:55 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 34B73E0AA1; Mon, 7 May 2012 21:13:32 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mx.virtyou.com (mx.virtyou.com [178.33.32.244]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C5BA2E0A92 for ; Mon, 7 May 2012 21:11:25 +0000 (UTC) Received: from weird.wonkology.org (xdsl-78-35-174-101.netcologne.de [78.35.174.101]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA (128/128 bits)) (Client did not present a certificate) by mx.virtyou.com (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 11261DC041 for ; Mon, 7 May 2012 23:11:25 +0200 (CEST) Date: Mon, 7 May 2012 23:11:23 +0200 From: Alex Schuster To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs Message-ID: <20120507231123.49125d30@weird.wonkology.org> In-Reply-To: References: <20120216162948.7eea6070@weird.wonkology.org> <20120218180407.74055f5e@weird.wonkology.org> <20120218220521.1278e023@bluewin.ch> <1705219.vsiCQe2Sr8@weird> <20120507144134.4ea24fc3@weird.wonkology.org> X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.8.0 (GTK+ 2.24.10; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Archives-Salt: ad6afcea-a844-48dd-aeef-d5e16cdd7918 X-Archives-Hash: ab262489286bd709a6e55d276325f0a2 Mark Knecht writes: > On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 5:41 AM, Alex Schuster > wrote: > > 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 > > ] [...] > OK, fire up two terminals. In one run top, hit 1 & z so you see all > your CPUs and then watch CPU usage. In the second terminal su to root > and run iotop -o. Now, watch for a few minutes and get a feel for > what's going on when video is not running. Then start your video and > watch IO usage and CPU usage. Where's the problem? > > Once you get an idea where the bottleneck is we can address what a > solution might be. In general, if the CPUs aren't maxed out and it's > an I/O problem then usually a bit more buffering is a simple solution. > Other more draconian solution might be a real-time kernel with a > player (if there is one) that is set up for real-time playback. > > Looking forward to hearing your test results. Thanks for your support, Mark! I did this already, but sometimes I do not notice anything. I guess it's short I/O operations in that case. CPU load is not the problem, and it happens for both high-quality videos and small ones. Currently iotop shows stuff like kjournald, kworker, kdeinit4, akonadiserver, firefox. And lots of virtuoso-t and nepomuk when I enable indexing again, which I just suspended. And mplayer of course, it shows up in about every 2nd redisplay, which happens every second. Well... but when I do the same in the other window manager, it seems I see fewer processes then. Are they mostly suspended when I am on another display? And I should fire up the same stuff (Firefox, Chromium, maybe KDEPIM stuff) in the other WM and see if this makes things worse. But I'll do this tomorrow. Thanks for the inspiration, though, at least I have something more to try now. The interrupts are very small normally, but noticeable, annoying and somewhat embarrassing. When they just happened I only noticed akonadi and kjournald during that time. I can force larger interrupts by doing my dd command. But anyway - my intention is not so much to find out what all these I/O processes are and how to make them calm down, renice them or whatever. Four cores @ 3.6 GHz just should be able to play movies without any interruption. And it _is_ possible, when I start the playback on another window manager, while KDE is still running on the other display. I could just switch to, um, ummmm.... Gnome maybe... or Xfce4... or something else, but I would not like to do so. Despite by big KDE problems. I hate KDE. But I still want it. I feel mad. Wonko