Arch Linux

FoPref

Member

From: Erlangen / Germany

Registered: 2004-03-24

Posts: 96

Website

Serious CPU usage problem

Hi everyone,

I used to have my own kernel running and everything was fine.

Recently, after the cool changes which happend with kernel/udev related stuff in the last months and weeks, and with the "beyond" kernel being available and having the possibility to use software suspend2 an easy way,  I thought it would perhaps be better to switch to the beyond kernel package, staying up to date easily and not having to care about wether some update perhaps wouldn't work with my old kernel anymore...

After some minor hassle, I got it working fine and thought, well, runs reasonably well. But then I discovered some strange issues:
* If I boot with the regular kernel, log in to the console, use mplayer to play an mp3/ogg file, I got 22% cpu usage by mplayer, and additional system cpu usage, summing up to only 66% of my cpu is in idle state!
* If I do the same thing with the beyond kernel, it is still around 7 to 8 %, the CPU has a maximum of 87% idle time
* If I start up X and start xmms, without playing anything, even with stock configuration and nothing changed/enabled, xmms will take 12% of my CPU!
* If I run some other things aside (like mplayer), xmms - still being idle! - still uses 4% CPU
* if I actually use xmms, it takes up to 20% cpu
* now mplayer only uses 2% CPU - but still too much for only playing a music file

So I just don't have anything left than scratching my head. What's going on there?

Ford Prefect

soloport

Member

Registered: 2005-03-01

Posts: 442

Re: Serious CPU usage problem

XMMS doesn't play nice with today's Linux scheduler.  It's old.  (I still use XMMS -- out of sheer habit -- and ignore the problem.)