I'm using Suse 9.3 and Amarok for music. The only problem is that when I have amarok playing it slows my computer down considerably. Like I mean when I open YaST without amarok playing, it opens right up with no hesitation at all. As soon as I have amarok playing, I literally need to stop the music because YaST takes that long to open.
I also notice the same thing with firefox/konqueror. When amarok is playing it takes firefox/konqueror a good 10-20 seconds to open where as if amarok wasnt playing it would just pop right open.

If amarok is open in the background (not minimized to the system tray) it slows everything down alot more!

It even slows my framerate down:

With amarok open in the background and playing: 15000 fps.
with amarok minimized to system tray and playing: 16000 fps.
with amarok not playing at all: 17000 fps.

Is this normal or what??

I'm not sure about the amarok issue, but I am curious as to where you got those framerates???

I'm only asking because a display can only update around 70 times/sec.

sorry.. maybe im reading it wrong?

this is what glxgears outputs.. the top framerates are when i start glxgears while amarok is playing music and the bottom high framerates are after i stop amarok.

3826 frames in 5.0 seconds = 765.200 FPS
4842 frames in 5.0 seconds = 968.400 FPS
4693 frames in 5.0 seconds = 938.600 FPS
4035 frames in 5.0 seconds = 807.000 FPS
4239 frames in 5.0 seconds = 847.800 FPS
4930 frames in 5.0 seconds = 986.000 FPS
4896 frames in 5.0 seconds = 979.200 FPS
4811 frames in 5.0 seconds = 962.200 FPS
4215 frames in 5.0 seconds = 843.000 FPS
19902 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3980.400 FPS
84031 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16806.199 FPS
87753 frames in 5.0 seconds = 17550.600 FPS
87274 frames in 5.0 seconds = 17454.801 FPS
87751 frames in 5.0 seconds = 17550.199 FPS
87324 frames in 5.0 seconds = 17464.801 FPS
87657 frames in 5.0 seconds = 17531.400 FPS
84365 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16873.000 FPS

Ah, umm, fair enough.

I thought you meant under some "real" rendering conditions (i.e., game) where I'm doing good to get ~50 fps.

I tried the glxgear test on my system and closing amarok adds about 1000fps(11500--->12500).
So the difference you are seeing doesn't seem right.

Open up a term and type "top" with amarok open, what kind of resources is it eating up??

Also how much ram do you have?

As much as I like amarok it is quite resource heavy, but never thought that much

I have always had the same problem. for me amarok takes up about 90 megs of ram. my glxgears go from 900 -> 1000. Something you might want to try is to make sure that you are using Gstreamer (that's supposed to work better than some of the others)

top - 18:47:12 up 49 min, 3 users, load average: 0.30, 0.39, 0.37
Tasks: 74 total, 1 running, 73 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 2.0% us, 0.7% sy, 0.0% ni, 96.7% id, 0.0% wa, 0.3% hi, 0.3% si
Mem: 1024968k total, 487152k used, 537816k free, 58160k buffers
Swap: 1052248k total, 0k used, 1052248k free, 266540k cached

it looks like amarok is using almost half of my memory? that seems a little excessive.

Is there another music program I can use that doesnt consume so much resources? Hows xmms?

I never had a problem like this when I was using winamp on my old pentium 350 with 128 megs of ram. wierd

Well, I would try other music apps such as Mplayer, xmms, etc... and see if the problem persists... Also you may wont to get a real-time system monitore for CPU and RAM and find out what Amarok is really doing... If it is taking up that much memory then it would make sense that your system would slow because of the increased SWAP usage....

KC