I just installed damn small linux on a 350 mghz, 196mb ram and 8 gig HD. Should XMMS run ok on that system. Its got a soundblaster awe and when I try to play a mp3 XMMS loads the song but sits there, If i grab the play bar with the mouse and move it I can hear parts of the song.

It's ok - depends what you still let work there.

My machine is 500MHz Pentium III and it manages XMMS/MPlayer/KDE and some other stuff too.

Though I'vve achived a greater performance after I added more memory I consider XMMS as very economic program around 50MB with all plugins activated

You can try starting it and use top to see how much eats
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
28986 emanoil 9 0 6460 6388 4704 S 0.0 0.7 0:03 xmms
28987 emanoil 9 0 6460 6388 4704 S 0.0 0.7 0:00 xmms
28985 emanoil 9 0 6460 6388 4704 S 0.0 0.7 0:00 xmms
28983 emanoil 9 0 6460 6388 4704 S 0.0 0.7 0:00 xmms
28984 emanoil 9 0 6460 6388 4704 S 0.0 0.7 0:00 xmms
28982 emanoil 9 0 6460 6388 4704 S 0.0 0.7 0:01 xmms


I have compiled recently a custom versioin of xmms because of alsa support and it sound great

In your situations I thing you should better put some more memmory if you want to use some manager like KDE but if you use lets say iceWM this way you'll have great performance

reagards

i'm using an old p133 (before p66) holding all my oggs for serving, doing proxy, apache, mail,.. and plays oggs without any problem (~40% cpu) with mp3blaster at the console (it's a sb16 isa). so i don't think that's a performance problem. try setting xmms to a nice value of -10 (man renice) and see how it does.
maybe you have problems because X is running with nice -10.
is it a pci or isa soundcard? maybe there are latency problems.

sl mritch.