Hi,

recently I\'ve been using amarok a lot to listen to music while also doing some fairly CPU- and disk-intensive stuff (digital image processing).

I can\'t figure out how to stop songs from skipping. I\'ve reniced the amarokapp process to -10 to make sure it gets CPU priority, but I still notice skips. I think that maybe it\'s a disk issue rather than a CPU issue - anyone have any ideas? Is there some command I can use to get the whole file loaded into memory before playback starts? This is with gstreamer.

Thanks,

Martin

Happens to me a lot with suse 10.0 but it has not much to do with amarok as it affects the whole desktop.

Never happened with PCLinuxOS, where the desktop was always very responsive even with high CPU usage.

It might be a kernel scheduler thing

Maybe there is a way to increase the buffer of the output engine (of course this has disadvantages, too, like higher memory consumption and pause etc will not reactive instantely).

Or try another IO Scheduler in the Kernel, maybe this helps.

dma enabled? lol
hdparm.

actually i\'m just kidding, you most likely have it enabled. but better check it. at least it would be a reason for this behaviour.

cheers,
muesli

No I know why PCLOS is so smooth (it never skip audio)

> I\'m using suse 10.0 for now and I noticed the desktop is very sluggish on
> heavy disk IO activity (DMA is enabled) or high CPU usage. Yet in PCLOS the
> desktop is always ultra smooth even with processes taking 99% CPU !
> So my question is what settings are used in PCLOS to have this smooth
> experience.
>


Excellent, thats what pclos kernels are supposed to do, even when under load.

The main reason is that PCLOS incorporates the \'CK\' kernel patchset into its
kernels. The ck patches improve system responsiveness with specific emphasis
on the desktop. The main patch which produces the \"smoothness\' you describe
is the addition of the staircase scheduler.