[solved] system hangs while moving window + slow playback

Sujao · l33t Joined: 25 Sep 2004 Posts: 677 Location: Germany

Hi everybody,

due to a headcrash I had to reinstall gentoo. At the moment I use:

gentoo-sources-2.6.11-r6
xorg-6.8.2-r1
fluxbox-0.9.12-r1

OK now THE PROBLEM:

When I click-and-hold a window to move it the whole system hangs. gkrellm2 stops refreshing immediatelly and so does xmms. After about 2s when the buffer of xmms is empty it also stops to play music. As soon as I release the mouse button everything continues normally. I also notices that when I swith back from a tty to X (CTRL+ALT+F7) the music stops for about 1s too.

I am pretty sure that this didnt happen with my last gentoo installation.

Any ideas what could be the cause of this?

EDIT: Now I started an emerge and I notice that xmms stotters from time to time. Altough emerge runs with root privileges I dont think this should happen.

EDIT2: The same with mplayer. The video plays to slow and stotters pretty often. When I jump forward the video needs about 5s to start playing again.

Hayl · Posted: Tue Apr 26, 2005 2:33 pm Post subject:

it's normal and will go away if your window manager supports non-wireframe window resizing/moving. it is some sort of limitation in the way X handles the moving of windows in wire-fram mode.
_________________
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Sujao · l33t Joined: 25 Sep 2004 Posts: 677 Location: Germany

But how come I didnt have this problem with my previous installation?

c0bblers · Guru Joined: 28 Mar 2003 Posts: 403

Hi,

Sounds like it might be an iffy bit of CPU/IO scheduling to me....you using composite or eye candy things that use a lot of CPU? Try running top and seeing what processes are taking all the CPU/IO time. If it looks fine then try some different IO schedulers...I think the gentoo kernel comes with different schedulers anyway (don't use it myself)....add elevator=cfq to your kernel boot options to see if that makes any difference. Other than that, you could try a different CPU scheduler but that'll involve a different kernel patchset. I'm a ck man myself, staircase is in my experience much nicer for desktop than the mainline scheduler.

Cheers,
James

Sujao · l33t Joined: 25 Sep 2004 Posts: 677 Location: Germany

I dont have any eye candy at all since its a base fluxbox. I dont even configured a theme or background image. Beside cc1 there is nothing CPU consuming. I think there is something wrong in my configuration maybe with the kernel. I just put in a CD and while the drive was opening and then closing the music stottered again. After this I am pretty sure that something is messed up.

As soon as emerging as complete I will try that elevator option. What exactly does a CPU scheduler do?

EDIT: @c0bblers: I tried that elevator options and it makes no difference.

Sujao · l33t Joined: 25 Sep 2004 Posts: 677 Location: Germany

OK I solved the FIRST problem with the freeze of xmms while moving a window while playing around with fluxbox settings. In order to avoid this you need to Active Opaque Windows Moving (fluxbox menu-->configure-->opaque window moving). Now knowing how to solve it I searched for this option and found that I am not the first one with this problem. Actually I remembered that I had this problem already about 6months ago when I installed fluxbox for the first time.

Here is the explanation:

c0bblers · Guru Joined: 28 Mar 2003 Posts: 403

Sujao · l33t Joined: 25 Sep 2004 Posts: 677 Location: Germany

It's slow at everything. I have been watching lots of videos so I know how fast they are played back normally and how much recources mplayer takes. Its definatelly to slow. I also compiled with all CPU flags (3dnow 3dnowext, mmx, mmxext) and it didnt help. I also played them with "-nosound" and it was still slow so its not due to the sound. It DOES use xv, too.

More ideas?

Sujao · l33t Joined: 25 Sep 2004 Posts: 677 Location: Germany

DOH!

I got it! It was really a DMA issue. But not with the CD-Drive but with the harddrive. As I didnt have this problem with hardrives I also didnt check this before. They were running without DMA and when I tried to activate it it gave me an error. I searched for it in the forums and found out that I compiled the wrong module for the IDE controller of my motherboard. After fixing this everything runs fine.

Thx for mentioning it.

off topic: english grammar: Which tense do I have to use If something didnt occure to this very moment and then for the first time. I cant use past perfect, can I? Would it be simple past then? The point is if I can say "I havent had this problem yet!" Afaik I can only say this if this never happened before, but it DID happen once. So then "I hadn't had this problem before"?