Thus spake martin f krafft: > folks, sorry if i am posting this here, but i am sort of clueless, and > i'd love some advise from you wise people! > > i have this AMD Thunderbird 1.3 GHz machine with 512Mb of SD-RAM, a 1Gb > swap partition on a 20Gb 5400 seagate IDE drive. that's quite powerful, > isn't it? > > Linux piper 2.4.9 #1 Tue Sep 11 15:39:28 CEST 2001 i686 unknown > 16:45:25 up 13 days, 1:17, 7 users, load average: 3.40, 3.56, 3.70 > 84 processes: 83 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped > CPU states: 0.8% user, 22.3% system, 1.0% nice, 75.9% idle > Mem: 505844K total, 502788K used, 3056K free, 11456K buffers > Swap: 996020K total, 31172K used, 964848K free, 438552K cached > > however, i am continuously having troubles. for instance, in a typical > situation, i'd have windowmaker running with four terms, xmms playing > some 192kbps MP3s, some ssh sessions into it, and an rsync, bzip/gzip, > or make-kpkg process running. i am not usually interactively using X. > > in such a situation, xmms (or mpg123 without X, it doesn't matter) > continuously skips on MP3s and it's *very* annoying. i even went as far > as to renice xmms to -20 *and* rsync/bzip/gzip/make-kpkg to 20, but it > doesn't really help. > > this is ridiculous. a 1.3 GHz machine should really be able to handle > two intense processes at the same time, after all, UNIX is a true > time-sharing OS. but i am at a loss why this thing is unable to handle > two processes. > > any clues? > > -- > martin; (greetings from the heart of the sun.) > \____ echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:"; net@madduck > > "no problem is so formidable > that you can't just walk away from it." It seems like a harddrive access problem, assuming the mp3's are local. Try (in single user mode) hdparm /dev/hda (presumably) and make sure that it looks something like: /dev/hdb: multcount = 16 (on) I/O support = 1 (32-bit) unmaskirq = 1 (on) using_dma = 1 (on) keepsettings = 0 (off) nowerr = 0 (off) readonly = 0 (off) readahead = 8 (on) geometry = 116301/16/63, sectors = 117231408, start = 0 busstate = 1 (on) If it doesn't, hdparm -t -T to test the speed, tweak the settings and repeat the test. SCSI is of course faster, but even IDE is pretty good: /dev/hdb: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 1.01 seconds =126.73 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 2.01 seconds = 31.84 MB/sec Enjoy. Steve
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