hi, I have OpenSuse 12.2, I monitored the CPU load after feeling the pc slowing down at times and noticed how the ‘pulseaudio’ process and the mp3 player both take a lot of CPU. I tried with several mp3 players: Amarok, qmmp and even a java based player (Jaco). Reading about ‘pulseaudio’ I found that it’s suppose to cause some trouble so I disabled with Yast, but the problem still persists. Mp3 player can take up from 20% CPU to slowing it down severely for a few seconds at different intervals. Anything else I should be checking ?
A p4 is quite good enough to run Linux. I wonder if perhaps the system is using clock modulation or something. I would install cpupower and check the information about it by running cpupower frequency-info as root.
I never had this problems with previous versions of Suse (10.2, 11.2) regarding mp3 playing or other multimedia files such as video files. The ram is PC800-40 1GB (2X512MB) RDRAM Rambus Memory.
Your rig is decent. If it is very old then there is chance that motherboard performance might have reduced
Did we try out what @nightwishfan suggested.
Also we may need to check whether any clocking issues are there in BIOS.
I did have problem with lagging of HD videos when using celeron 2 GHZ processors.
But not with mp3
yes, I think the PC is old, it’s a Dell Precision 340. So far I haven’t had any performance issues that I could think of as the hardware been old. The cpupower command returns:
cpupower frequency-info
analyzing CPU 0:
no or unknown cpufreq driver is active on this CPU
boost state support:
Supported: no
Active: no
$cpupower frequency-info
analyzing CPU 0:
driver: acpi-cpufreq
CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0 1
CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
maximum transition latency: 10.0 us.
hardware limits: 1.60 GHz - 2.90 GHz
available frequency steps: 2.90 GHz, 2.80 GHz, 2.70 GHz, 2.60 GHz, 2.50 GHz, 2.40 GHz, 2.30 GHz, 2.20 GHz, 2.10 GHz, 2.00 GHz, 1.90 GHz, 1.80 GHz, 1.70 GHz, 1.60 GHz
available cpufreq governors: conservative, userspace, powersave, ondemand, performance
current policy: frequency should be within 1.60 GHz and 2.90 GHz.
The governor "ondemand" may decide which speed to use
within this range.
current CPU frequency is 1.60 GHz.
boost state support:
Supported: no
Active: no
25500 MHz max turbo 4 active cores
25500 MHz max turbo 3 active cores
25500 MHz max turbo 2 active cores
25500 MHz max turbo 1 active cores
That is totally weird . i paid for a 2.90 GHZ processor but it runs at 1.6 >:(
It states right there it will run between 1.6 and 2.9 depending on the system load. Start a flash video or encode and it will say 2.9.
As for the issue at hand. I am not sure if that is good or bad cpupower shows nothing. Perhaps good as it might mean the system is not using pentium 4 clock modulation (which really slows things down when idle). That being said we are not any closer to solving the issue. I suppose you will have to narrow down all the performance problems. Is ‘everything slow?’ if not it might just be an issue with video card and sound card. Sorry I do not have any more specific advice at the moment.
oops . Thanks. I does scale when i start YaST and it refershes the repos. I always though processors ran at a constant cruise speed. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. I think the tux is preventing overheating of machines.
$cpupower frequency-info
analyzing CPU 0:
driver: acpi-cpufreq
CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0 1
CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
maximum transition latency: 10.0 us.
hardware limits: 1.60 GHz - 2.90 GHz
available frequency steps: 2.90 GHz, 2.80 GHz, 2.70 GHz, 2.60 GHz, 2.50 GHz, 2.40 GHz, 2.30 GHz, 2.20 GHz, 2.10 GHz, 2.00 GHz, 1.90 GHz, 1.80 GHz, 1.70 GHz, 1.60 GHz
available cpufreq governors: conservative, userspace, powersave, ondemand, performance
current policy: frequency should be within 1.60 GHz and 2.90 GHz.
The governor "ondemand" may decide which speed to use
within this range.
current CPU frequency is 2.90 GHz.
boost state support:
Supported: no
Active: no
25500 MHz max turbo 4 active cores
25500 MHz max turbo 3 active cores
25500 MHz max turbo 2 active cores
25500 MHz max turbo 1 active cores
On 2013-02-02 07:36, nightwishfan wrote:
>
> vazhavandan;2523963 Wrote:
>> That is totally weird . i paid for a 2.90 GHZ processor but it runs at
>> 1.6 >:(
>
> It states right there it will run between 1.6 and 2.9 depending on the
> system load. Start a flash video or encode and it will say 2.9.
>
> As for the issue at hand. I am not sure if that is good or bad cpupower
> shows nothing. Perhaps good as it might mean the system is not using
> pentium 4 clock modulation (which really slows things down when idle).
> That being said we are not any closer to solving the issue. I suppose
> you will have to narrow down all the performance problems. Is
> ‘everything slow?’ if not it might just be an issue with video card and
> sound card. Sorry I do not have any more specific advice at the moment.
>
I don’t think video is involved. A P4 is old, compared with recent CPUs.
If the OP says that before he did not have this problem, I would then
try to compile a simple mp3 player (there are some that run on the CLI)
specifying a pentium4 as the target CPU, and see how that code runs
compared with the same program as downloaded from the repos.
If there is a difference there, it will be because of the set of
optimizations used for current compilation is not that good for a P4.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
ON your CPU problem. You have to check that the motherboard and memory have the same bus speed, also the CPU. Your CPU must have a faster transfer speed and it just slows down to what the motherboard can use.
Guess I’ll try that. I did try however a java player and a java library (jaco) for which I did a very simple interface that plays all mp3 files on a given directory.
Probably GUI based players are slowing things down. Can you try turn off visualisation plug-ins(fancy fountains and stuff) if you are using them.
They use lot of cpu cycles.
Also try out CLI based mplayer
$mplayer test.mp3
MPlayer2 UNKNOWN (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer Team
Can't open joystick device /dev/input/js0: No such file or directory
Can't init input joystick
Playing test.mp3.
Detected file format: MP2/3 (MPEG audio layer 2/3) (libavformat)
[mp3 @ 0x7fee52c635c0]max_analyze_duration 5000000 reached at 5015510
[lavf] stream 0: audio (mp3), -aid 0...
It also supports playlists
mplayer -playlist <file>
On 2013-02-02 16:16, mhunt0 wrote:
> Guess I’ll try that. I did try however a java player and a java library
> (jaco) for which I did a very simple interface that plays all mp3 files
> on a given directory.
Java software is typically quite demanding in memory usage, and cpu.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz|
