I seriously doubt you are actually seeing a Linux MM problem.
Run the free program, it should have output like this:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 63232 42028 21204 9196 3644 29300
-/+ buffers: 9084 54148
Swap: 72288 96 72192
Now, with your logic.. Someone would say that I have 21megs free. But this
is not the case. 33megs are being used as disk cache. If I were to use the
21megs free it would start shrinking the disk cache.
So I really have 54megs free before it has to hit swap.
It's not the MM system causing your problem most likely.
I'd guess that you are running out of CPU or you are running out of disk
I/O bandwidth.
I'd be happy to help you out, however, you left out alot of information.
What MP3 player are you using, does it do buffering? What type of sound
card to you have, do you know the DMA buffersize, what kind of HDD (IDE or
SCSI), is your HDD using DMA or PIO mode and what speed CPU do you have?
What was the system load when this happens? Does your mp3 player have a
realtime mode?
What kind of video card do you have?
Without this sort of info I can't possibly help you.
If swap was being used it would likely make the situation worse as your
system wasted CPU doing the swapping.
We'd all be happy to help you.. But dont be nasty..
On Sat, 5 Sep 1998, Woody wrote:
> Greetings folks,
>
> Since I haven't been on the list for awhile, I thought I would throw a
> question in and see what the answer might be. I'm hoping it will be to
> my liking...
>
> What is the status with memory management under linux? Right now, I have
> 80M of physical memory, where 78 of it is being used and my swap isn't
> even being touched. So what do you get? You get choppy mp3's while your
> running your nice, window manager and running netscape, etc., etc.,
> etc.,...It's very annoying....if swap were to be used, I wouldn't have
> this problem...it's pretty bad that I can boot into my Winnuts OS and
> have no problems, yet, Linux, which I feel is a superior OS, can't even
> handle damn memory issues! Is the coding for this issue THAT hard that
> we can't get it fixed, and fixed now?
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