XMMS skips when compiling / other tasks

curmudgeon42 · 01-22-2005, 02:13 PM

I use XMMS to play music (MP3) while I am tooling around with Linux, which is quite often. :-)

Sometimes, when I start a new program or start compiling a program it will start to skip or distort. This doesn't happen constantly when the processor is pegged, but it happens more often when the processor is pegged.

It isn't a RAM issue as far as I can tell because 'top' reports that of my 512MB RAM only about 490MB is used right now, while I have KDE, Firefox, Thunderbird, XMMS, and emerge (GCC) running.

Is there a way I can give XMMS a higher priority when running it so that the resources it demands are given to it and the other processes have to wait?

Also, I am currently using OSS because I had a large battle with ALSA which I lost. If it will help my skipping problem though I will ask for a rematch.

Thanks for the help,

~ Justin

darkleaf · 01-22-2005, 02:43 PM

ALSA skips as well when I do those things so that won't help much.

Linux~Powered · 01-22-2005, 03:05 PM

Quote:

Is there a way I can give XMMS a higher priority when running it so that the resources it demands are given to it and the other processes have to wait?

The command you're looking for is the nice command.

Code:

nice n or -n xmms

Where n is a lower priority and -n is higher. 19 is the lowest -20 is the highest, 0 is default

curmudgeon42 · 01-22-2005, 04:21 PM

thanks i'll give that a shot

curmudgeon42 · 01-22-2005, 04:28 PM

well it seems to work but i can't run 'nice -n -20' as a non-root user. according to some google pages i found this is appropriate behavior. but i don't want to run XMMS as root. i could issue a renice command as root after running xmms as a standard user, but i would rather come up with a solution where XMMS always run at a high priority.

is there a group that i could add my standard user to to allow nice to be used with negative commands by that user. could i get rid of the security checks in nice completely? (it is a desktop on which i'm not concerned about users abusing process priviledges)

thanks,

~ Justin

curmudgeon42 · 01-22-2005, 04:40 PM

well even with xmms reniced to -19 it seems that emerge can still make it skip horribly

is there anything else i can try? this is a bad sign - windows can do something just fine that linux can't. my music will still play in windows when other processes are demanding resources...

~ Justin

Brian1 · 01-22-2005, 05:32 PM

XMMS - really should never skip, even at considerable background-compiling load. It is mostly is a scheduler and kernel issue. It can be tweaked but is a complicated process and even worst to setup everytime xmms is killed and restarted. They say it was fixed in the 2.6.0.test6 kernel and newer. But it is worst in some versions of 2.6 than others.

Things you can do:
1. go and compile xmms with CPU-optimizations for your CPU
2. set the output-buffer to a higher value
( Preferences -> Output Plugin -> configure -> Buffering -> Buffer size(ms)
Enter something like 2500 oder 3000 )
3. use a decent soundcards that actually does things in hardware
Switching from ISA- to PCI-cards helps a lot

Brian1
" Google the Linux way @ http://www.google.com/linux "

curmudgeon42 · 01-22-2005, 05:42 PM

1. I think I already did this. I use Gentoo so I had already compiled it with architecture and cflags set.

2. I will give this a shot.

3. my soundcard is onboard. would switching to a PCI soundblaster really help this issue?

Thanks,

~ Justin

Brian1 · 01-22-2005, 06:02 PM

You can do a ' lspci ' and see if your audio device is listed there. Sound Blaster Live is a good cheap choice. I am sure someone can recommend a better card here. If posible I would try to find a friend with a SB Live card and try it in your machine before buying one. Just to see if that works. The more hardware control the card can do the less of load on the cpu there is.

Brian1
" Google the Linux way @ http://www.google.com/linux "