Re: MP3 skippety skip skipageness

Mike A. Harris (mharris@ican.net)
Thu, 11 Mar 1999 05:43:36 -0500 (EST)


On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, Greg Patterson wrote:

Your reply was private, but I've CC'd the list because your
suggestion is not my particular case, and I didn't want everyone
else to assume that my case was as discussed on slashdot. Hope
you don't mind...

>> The system is totally idle. I just booted, logged in, ran mc,
>> discovered that it will call an mp3 player, tried running an mp3,
>> examined the error output, found out that sound modules didn't
>> load, spent 10 minutes troubleshooting why, determined that
>> conf.modules is different from 2.0 to 2.2, made the necessary
>> change by adding a "dma16=5", and then loaded the modules. Then
>> I tried playing the mp3 again. It worked. Up until the skip
>> skip part above.
>
>Check this article:
>
>http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/02/17/1813211.shtml

Yep, read it.

>If you are using Accelerated-X then you are probably affected by the PCI
>Retry acceleration in X. Find out how to disable it and see if it helps
>your situation. I can tell you that I tried some similar tests here such
>as:

No. I use Metro-X, however X was not running at all anyways so X
doesn't matter.

>* Running XFree86 with several X terms running.

Nope, no X.

>* Running Netscape.

Nope, no X.

>* Running an mp3 under X11Amp.

Nope, no X.

>* Doing a make -j zImage

Nope, no compilation happening. As I stated, my system was idle.
I have few system services running, httpd, inetd, sshd, smbd, and
thats about it. inetd services are all practically disabled. I
wasn't using any of the network services locally (localhost), and
all of my network connections (eth0, ppp0) were down, as in
ifconfig xxx0 down. So, the only active programs were PINE,
sitting idle, and the MP3 player. I tried it several times, and
got similar results each time, I quit PINE and other apps and
even went to single user with nothing running but the MP3 player,
and it still skips. I have a 200Mhz CPU. In 2.0.x I can play
MP3's just fine, and have many many apps running and actively
doing stuff. Only very very occasionally does anything break up
(maybe once or twice in an hour of heavy activity).

>The above was all at once and the mp3 only started to skip when the load
>average hit about 60-70 and swap thrashing and resource vforking started
>to fail.

My load avg was very low - only the mp3 player was running. It
is repeatable. If anyone has suggestions, I can try anything
you like to try and locate the problem. It certainly isn't X
though, or any other apps. I'm pretty sure it is kernel related.

--
Mike A. Harris                   Linux advocate      GNU advocate
Computer Consultant                          Open Source advocate  

The DVORAK keyboard layout RULES! I memorized it in 45 minutes and I don't think I'm ever going back to QWERTY!

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