Re: Sudden sound performance problem
On Thu, Mar 02, 2006 at 11:25:52PM -0600, Adam Porter wrote:
>
> I've been running Debian full-time on my desktop for over a year
> now, with a combination of testing and unstable (mostly testing).
> At the moment I'm running 2.6.15, compiled with Debian's default
> config except for turning on a couple of things so I could use the
> atop monitor. I've used ALSA from the very beginning with my two SB
> Live! Value cards, and it works perfectly.
How long have you been using 2.6.15? The ALSA drivers are in the
kernel.
> Well, it has, but in just the past week I've noticed very strange
> audio performance problems. If CPU usage spikes for a few seconds,
> the audio tends to skip (when I'm listening to XMMS, for example).
> This has *never* happened before.
Unfortunately, real-time sound on linux kind of sucks. It may just be
that you've never used so much CPU before. There are kernel patches
that substantially improve sound performance, or you can downgrade the
kernel, but before resorting to drastic measures, make sure the problem
is really in the kernel...
[...]
> I'm not sure if this is related, but at the same time, I've noticed
> that some apps like amarok, Kaffeine with the Xine engine
These are kde apps, leading me to suspect you may be using artsd, the
sound-multiplexing daemon installed with kde. Try killing artsd and
see if the problem goes away. In that case, probably increasing the
priority of artsd should help. Alternatively, you can set up ALSA to
use hardware mixing and KDE not to use artsd.
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