Dear all,
Sorry to hit the forum once again with a reincarnation of an old
post[0]. i am about to jump out the window and take my computer with
me.
My machine here is an Athlon XP 3000+ with 1 Gb of memory and a VIA
chipset with a
0000:00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc.
VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50)
soundcard.
When I attempt to stream MP3/Ogg Vorbis data, or play it locally,
with xmms or alsaplayer, it will randomly enter phases of repeated
skips. These happen in bursts, thus it will play fine for a while
and then suddenly skip 30 times over the period of 20 seconds (or
so). I don't have to be doing anything and it seems to happen
completely unpredictably, but it is usually accompanied with general
sluggishness of the mouse and system responsiveness.
One way to cause slurs in the music output is to switch desktops in
fluxbox, but the music does not skip, it merely delays a bit (but
noticeable). Starting 10 instances of 'md5sum /dev/zero', on the
other hand, loads the processor appropriately, but the skips do not
seem to increase. Also, renicing the player process to -20 does not
seem to make a difference.
Finally, I cannot reproduce the problem with mpg321 or ogg123, that
is to say, here the skips do not ever occur.
I don't think that the problem is the medium. The harddrive is
a 7200 UPM drive with DMA turned on and tuned as best as possible:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 1076 MB in 2.00 seconds = 537.28 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 178 MB in 3.03 seconds = 58.75 MB/sec
Also, the network link is 100Mbps to the streaming server and the
two machines are the only two on the network. The xmms and
alsaplayer buffers are always above 95% filled.
So this is completely baffling me (and really pissing me off on
top). I would assume that a machine with these specs can play MP3s
without jerking around all the time, but apparently it cannot, or
Linux is just being ridiculous.
The system seems to be in good health with about 100 processes.
15:50:17 up 24 days, 1:39, 1 user, load average: 0.17, 0.08, 0.07
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1037408 847388 190020 0 25224 423132
-/+ buffers/cache: 399032 638376
Swap: 498004 0 498004
I would really appreciate any comments. Pink Floyd's "Shine on You
Crazy Diamond" just sounds crap with 40 skips per minute.
0. http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2002/01/msg00863.html
--
Please do not CC me when replying to lists; I read them!
.''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debian.org>
: :' : proud Debian developer, admin, and user
`. `'`
`- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing a system
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