Xmms skips and "warbles" under high disk load

volumen1 · Guru Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 393 Location: Missoula, MT

Allright, this isn't anything new with me, but I always blamed my XMMS problems on my old hardware. But, I recently built myself a new desktop. It's a dual Opteron system with a 3ware hardware RAID10. So, it should handle itself fairly well.

Anyway, when I listen to mp3s in Xmms, all is well until I do something that really uses the hard disks. For example, if I "par2" or "unrar" a big archive, I will always have problems.

What happens normally is that xmms will hang for a second here and there and skip the track. Or, since I have done this:

hardcore · l33t Joined: 01 Nov 2003 Posts: 626 Location: MSU, MI

You may want to try out different i/o schedulers. Like cfq, as, etc. cfq might be right up your alley, as it's aimed for desktop performance. You can either patch a kernel yourself, or get a prepatched kernel such as ck-sources or love-sources. You'll then have to add a line to your grub.conf or lilo config. I'm not sure what it is, but I know it's on the forums somewhere. Also you could give nitro sources a try, it now has a patch in it that enables CFQ by default.
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volumen1 · Guru Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 393 Location: Missoula, MT

Hmm... I emerged 2.6.8.1-ck7 and I'm running it now. I also added elevator=cfq to my kernel options. I'm still having the warble and static in Xmms when I do anything that causes disk load.

How do I verify that my machine is actually using CFQ for for the io scheduler now?

Are there any other tricks that I could try?
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enrique · Guru Joined: 03 Sep 2002 Posts: 342 Location: Denmark

volumen1 · Guru Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 393 Location: Missoula, MT

I'm using 4 200G SATA drives with a 3ware 9xxx controller. So, my RAID10 logical drive shows up as /dev/sda.

As I understand it, you can't enable DMA for non-IDE devices? Is that correct?
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micmac · l33t Joined: 28 Nov 2003 Posts: 996

Hi,

I had skips and even full stops with xmms and other players like rhythmbox, too. Admittedly I experienced this on a laptop with a slow harddisk and lots of irq sharing. I found dmix to be guilty. Do you use dmix, too? If so, try disabling it.

mic

enrique · Guru Joined: 03 Sep 2002 Posts: 342 Location: Denmark

volumen1 · Guru Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 393 Location: Missoula, MT

Is dmix an Xmms plugin? If so, then I'm not using it. Whatever my problem is, it is, for sure, directly related to disk utilization.

If I play an mp3, it sounds awesome. But, as soon as I start to unrar a large archive, I see my disk utilization jump to 37M in gkrellm (which I'm assuming is M/s?) and then xmms starts introducing static and warbling like a warped record.
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volumen1 · Guru Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 393 Location: Missoula, MT

Hmm... just a followup on this. I also see this behavior in zinf, so I don't think it's an xmms thing. I also see it whether I use alsa or OSS emulation. I'm baffled at this point. I've even tried nice-ing my audio app to give it more priority and I've also tried to nice my "unrar" process to try to get it to be less agressive, but nothing has worked.

It feels like my disks are hauling so much ass the kernel just can't keep up?
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eean · Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2004 9:40 pm Post subject:

Do you have arts running?

I would try using a media player that uses more modern engines (gstreamer, xine-lib) like amaroK.

volumen1 · Guru Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 393 Location: Missoula, MT

I use fluxbox. But, at this point, I'll try anything. I'll emerge amaroK and see if it behaves any differently. I'll also try using arts and see if that makes a difference. I'll respond soon with an update. Heh... I'm sure you are all holding your breath. :wink:

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eean · Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2004 9:59 pm Post subject:

Don't worry about arts. I was going to tell you if you had it to kill it. So be sure to USE gstreamer and xine when you emerge amaroK.

volumen1 · Guru Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 393 Location: Missoula, MT

No dice. Amarok does it also. I'm going to try and use a PCI soundcard, instead of using the one on my motherboard and see if that helps. But, I'm not hopeful.

By the way, I tried Amarok with both arts and xine. I couldn't get gstreamer to work.
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HezniK · Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2004 11:37 pm Post subject:

hi

I also get this problem. But AFAIR i didn't had those issues before. Currently i have 2.6.8.1-nitro5 with preempt, and when i had it w/o preempt it was sucking also, but enabling preempt didn't solve that. I guess that might be issue with 2.6.8 kernel, i will try today 2.6.9 kernel and see if it's any better.

cheers
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eean · Posted: Wed Oct 20, 2004 12:05 am Post subject:

volumen1 · Guru Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 393 Location: Missoula, MT

I'll screw around with cache sizes. I've never seen that anywhere, so I'll dig up where to do that. I'm encouraged by Heznik's post.

Heznik, are you hearing both static and pitch changes or just one or the other? I've only had this machine for a little while, so I've been 2.6.8 the whole time. I didn't even think to try a different kernel. Please let me know what you find out!

Thanks!
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micmac · l33t Joined: 28 Nov 2003 Posts: 996

HezniK · Posted: Mon Oct 25, 2004 2:33 am Post subject:

hi

i tried new and fresh 2.6.9-nitro1, problems are the same. f*ck.
first i thought that it could be xmms's fault, but it's even with mpg123 (console player) and mplayer. so even when i play movie (with sound) it sometimes stuck for about 0.5-1.5s, it depends. practically always with high load, but i'm not sure for that, cause even when i have only xmms and QTorrent (with one or two torrents downloading) in background it happens also.
this kernel i also did pre-emptible + (new in this version) some big kernel locks preempting. it didn't helped.

on a side note i encountered strange behaviour with that kernel: when i type "emerge -pv (whatever)", my system hangs! completly! music stops, mouse stops, keybord don't work. can you believe that? jeeezus, kingdom for stable kernel !

btw. i got SB Live 1024, and far worser? procesor, P3 500.

so i think it could be kernel or maybe alsa. maybe upgrading alsa-lib?
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HezniK · Posted: Mon Oct 25, 2004 3:36 am Post subject:

BREAKING NEWS !

I started my old kernel (gentoo-dev-2.6.3- with preempt) - and it works at blazing speed !

when doing tests like starting firstly xmms, and then a whole bunch of big and (some small) applications (in pararell) , playing flash movies in opera, playing movies in mplayer, extracting big files, and others for almost 10 minutes and xmms maybe two times had very small jumps.

mplayer had sometimes few sound jumps , but it's likely to a/v synchronization, besides my system is a little old to divx'es

beside, i noticed that even opening xterm and mc in it is very fast (while opera and others programs in background openings) comparing to my old 2.6.8 and 2.6.9 (both nitro) system. just amazing !

so it's probably shity scheduler that was a culprit.

next i will try gentoo-dev-2.6.9 and see if it's the same.

me = happy

cheers
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volumen1 · Guru Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 393 Location: Missoula, MT

Which scheduler were you using on the 2.6.3 kernel that is working now? Also, is your audio playback halting or does it also change pitch (i.e. sounds like a record player is speeding up and slowing down)? I just want to figure out if you are having the same problem as me, or a different problem with somewhat similar symptoms.
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peter96362930 · Posted: Mon Oct 25, 2004 4:42 am Post subject:

Earlier in this thread enrique asked

volumen1 · Guru Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 393 Location: Missoula, MT

I replied telling him that I am using 4 SATA drives that are connected to a 3ware-9xxx RAID controller. So, my logical drive shows up as /dev/sda. But, I'm fairly certain that I can't enable DMA on logical devices like this.
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HezniK · Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2004 1:48 am Post subject:

hi again

I don't have pitch changing with my playback, only halting for moment.
Also, i was little too hurry with those good news. My old kernel (gentoo-dev-2.6.3) also has those xmms stucks. I didn't noticed them earlier (during the test), because (i think so) i didn't used too much ram and swap. Well, i currently have 2.6.9-ck2, which has some VM patches, and situation is little better, i think.
Talking about the symptoms i have, for example: when dragging any window when xmms is playing, sound's terribly getting cut (but this doesn't happen when i play on text consoles with mpg123 some mp3's, so maybe it's just X's issue).
Another thing: when music in xmms is playing, and i click on Preferences/ ALSA Output-plugin/Configure, sound skips few times. This doesn't happen now (with my new 2.6.9-ck2 kernel, probably thanks to -ck patch set).

But even now, when i wrote these words, and xmms is playing, sometimes (i dunno, 2-3 minutes, it depends) music skipping is happening, with empty swap, 90MB ram used and 10% cpu load).

Sorry for misunderstanding. Did a PCI soundcard helped?

cheers
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volumen1 · Guru Joined: 01 Mar 2003 Posts: 393 Location: Missoula, MT

I'm trying to find a PCI soundcard in my box of goodies, so I haven't tested it yet. I'm also going to see which modules have support for the 3w-9xxx SATA RAID controller that I'm using and maybe I'll have better luck? I'll post my results. I just haven't had time to work on it. I wish someone paid me to fix my audio problems... dang day jobs!
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Languid_Heap · n00b Joined: 20 Apr 2003 Posts: 14

Hey, I had similar problems for months before I stumbled across this post by Ormi. Essentially the solution was to add the following to /etc/conf.d/local.start