I've got a very strange problem (and no, it's not in my head). I play some mp3s in XMMS and everything's cool. Of course in my book, being on the computer and listening to mp3s isn't enough so I start to do other things (damn, I'm a rebel). Now usually, this is no problem. I can play UT and other such things and XMMS is cool with it. When I start doing *really* high CPU things though, like extracting 180MB files and compiling three things at once, XMMS cuts out. That's not so bad, with that much CPU usage, you'd expect some of the lower memory apps to be edged out of the picture and get choppy. Unfortunately, XMMS never gets choppy, it just goes from smooth to stopped, and it won't restart without me pushing play again. It's quite odd, methinks. Oh well, anyone out there have any advice?

I think your HDD is too slow.
Extracting a (large) file or compiling a program is quite disk-intensive.
Try to use a bigger buffer for XMMS (you can configure this in the output plugin settings of XMMS.)

In the 2.4 kernel series heavy disk IO (extracting tarballs, compiling) means too much time is spent inside the kernel and userspace apps are starved of timeslices. Kernel pre-empt and low-latency patches available in the 2.5/2.6 series should improve this dramatically. If you are feeling bored you could learn to recompile the kernel and apply these patches yourself, apparently they improve situations like this a lot.

Well, cwolf, I don't think that's it...it's a 7200rpm 80GB harddrive, it can transfer cached at 27mb/s so I'll have to disagree =). I guess I'll have to build the kernel...sigh...that'll have to wait til summer

Well, cwolf, I don't think that's it...it's a 7200rpm 80GB harddrive, it can transfer cached at 27mb/s so I'll have to disagree =). I guess I'll have to build the kernel...sigh...that'll have to wait til summer. Thanks alot to you both!