blips in X

[truth]

ok i'll try to be as descriptive as possible along with being brief. Im running gentoo 1.2 on a PIII 933, with a western digital hardrive set to pio mode 5,using devfs and a logitech usb mouse, a geforce2 mx 400(32mb), SoundBlaster live 5.1, using metalog for logging, and the xfs filesystem. I merged mplayer and xine, when i play movies it has a little skip every 20 seconds on the dot. i ran hdparm and confirmed dma was enabled, and that pio mode was set to 5, i played more than one movie to confirm its not the movie, i used both mplayer and xine, it happens in both players. i stopped metalog from running to make sure it wasnt happening due to metalogs writing to the disk, even though im pretty sure metalog shouldnt cause that anyways. So without metalog running, using different movies and different players while in KDE3 the movie will skip every 20 seconds. this doesnt happen when using xmms to play mp3's, however i am seemingly able to recreate this "skip" while using the mouse, if i move the mouse around to open windows or just clicking here and there, the mouse will skip as though i were experiencing lag. Ive run top but could not see any spike in cpu usage. But when i run gkrellm without moving the mouse, cpu stays around 0-4%, then when moving the mouse around it goes to 12% and if i continue to use the mouse every once in awhile cpu usage jumps to around 28% and it "skips" and returns imediatelly to the lower cpu usage. Since i can recreate this "skip" without playing a movie and with both xine and mplayer i believe the problem doesnt lie with the players. Im not sure where to go from here to determine what is causing the problem. relevant mplayer args are as follows vo = xv , ao = arts:/dev/dsp1
I have also run the movies with no sound to make sure it wasnt anything to do with the sound card but it still skips every 20 seconds on the dot. Any help would be appreciated. Sorry if this post is long, i wanted to make sure i included enough info.
thanks
-truth

[rukhoven]

Hmm, ok so you set up pio mode 5 ?.. In my memory pio modes 0 to 4 where as opposed to DMA reliant on the CPU, Switching on DMA always made my system work better (you apparently have it swiched on as well in combination with pio5). Is pio 5 another name for (ultra)dma? or perhaps ATA mode 5? Check your hdparm, In my experience the best setting would be "hdparm -m16 -c1 -d1 -u1 -a8 /dev/YOURDRIVEHERE"
No mention on PIO modes as you may notice Also in "man hdparm" I read that you have to be very careful with -p(0..5) Maybe you should try removing the -p setting. Test your drive with "hdparm -tT /dev/YRDRVHR"

For a WD disk I've heard that another value for -m, like 8 could be more optimal.

man hdparm
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AMDXp 2000 per sis745 con 60 GB HD
......Is what I'd like to have.......

[truth]

Well, after posting i went and merged blackbox, the exact same movies play fine in blackbox, Guess its just another reason to switch back to blackbox. i thought gentoo would make me a believer in KDE, but once again i will embrace blackbox.
Thanks for the response
--truth