I just got Gnome compiled and such under Gentoo with the 2.4.27 kernel from stage 2. One of the first things that I installed after I got Gnome working was xmms because I wanted something to listen to while I was installing yet more packages. The problem is though, under 100% cpu usage (not load) from like something simple as scrolling up and down in Mozilla will cause XMMS to either skip or stops completely (XMMS will show that its playing, but the position bar doesn't move and no sound comes out); XMMS doesn't crash, I can restart the song and it'll play sometimes.. Its really beginning to bug me as I could do the same thing in other distros and Windows with a heavier load. I did lookup some solutions on this site and elsewhere and I've tried the following already:

* installed different versions of XMMS (1.2.10 and 1.2.8) and mpg123/321 (0.2.10-mpg321 and 0.59-mpg123)
* enabled dma/32-bit access
* changed the buffer in alsa plugin for xmms
* enabled/disabled the dmix plugin for alsa
* tried the oss plugin for xmms and used aoss to run it (made things worse, pops and clicks, etc)

I've also seen an solution to run XMMS as root.. but thats not a good option... It seems silly for a 1.8ghz P4 with 768 MB of RAM not being able to play MP3s while compiling something in the background.

If anyone else has a solution its greatly appreciated! I'm out of options.....

Update Just logged into my hotmail account, has a bunch of flash ads and gif banners--scrolled up and down a bit in mozilla, cpu was at 100%, load <5% and xmms crashed hard. Had to kill the process.

Sometimes when the hard disk is in heavy use there might be problem with playing music. I have experinced this sometimes and also when I'm ripping CD's I get this problem.
I usually fix this by renice the ripping process one or two steps. This way I can still play music and I don't notice any performance loss in the ripping process.

Compiling sometimes load the computer heavy, not only the processor.

By the way: What load value are you referring to? Is it that from uptime ?
The load average value show on average how many processes are waitng to be processed by the processor. So any value below 1 are low load. This value can really go sky high in certain conditions. It's not a percentage value.

Your CPU% value is the current working load of your processor, how much of it's time is used.
These two values do not have to go hand in hand. The load average depend on more than the CPU load. There may circumstances where the processor waits for access to the IDE channel or some network connection where it can't do any work in the meantime, this may rise the load value while keeping the processor work low.

You might try changing the xmms option to Read info on load under the options tab in preferences.

I change the RTC value in /proc to 1024 and the stopped it from skipping a lot; kernel 2.6 prevented any skips regardless of the RTC value, though it seems that now the sound distorts at the end of a song (only happened once though hopefully )

Thanks for the ideas guys