Performance tweaks? Video playback and the X Server
 

Hi, I am running an FC5 box with 1.25GB of RAM and an Athlon 2400. I can't imagine that this would come under the category of a low spec'ed machine but I have had issues with the performance for some time.

The problem seems to come whenever I want to do anything involving video playback: when I try to play a DVD with ogle I get jerky video; when I try to play a DVD with Xine I get 'too many frames dropped' errors; watching digital TV with mplayer is a painful experience due to channel tuning time.

Admittedly I have Azureus running in the background which eats around 4% of CPU time but as my flatmate keeps cajoling me - these things would run fine on that system with another, more popular OS. I certainly am not going to revert to that sort of extreme measure but it disappoints me that I haven't been able to at least replicate the performance of a windoze machine.

What am I doing wrong? Is it because I use rpms and not apps compiled from source? Is it just a limitation of the X Server architecture? If I was to upgrade to FC6 tomorrow, what measures should I take to ensure that I maxed out the performance (video or otherwise) of the machine?

Hope to hear some suggestions!

Thanks

What display card are you using?. Also if it's an on-board card, that might be an issue.

It's an nvidia MX400, not an onboard card.

If you install the nvidia drivers, you will probably get the performance you are looking for. Here's an easy way to get the nvidia drivers installed in fedora core5: http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_cor...es.html#nVidia

I already have kmod-nvidia installed along with xorg-x11-drv-nvidia and I see the nvidia splashscreen on X initialisation. (All necessary changes made to xorg.conf for TV-Out.)

I don't think it is a driver problem.

Some things I have read that might help include low-latency scheduling, enabling raw devices, forcing use of /dev/shm instead of /tmp. These all seem quite extreme solutions though.

Anyone have any thoughts about that?