AMAROK is HEAVY

[Drone1]

When I run beryl, and have the Amarok mini window up, the scrolling text eats up the cpu. Worse so if you have the analyzer going. If I minimize to tray or to background invisible, cycles drop down to nill. This is regardless of whether it is actually playing music at the time.

Don't know what it is, but its something about the way the graphics for Amarok are generated when running under beryl ( all compositing environments...??).

At that point, I use foxytunes, or the Amarok quick-keys and be done with it.

[venquessa2]

It's to do with how Beryl/Compiz work.

Literally they copy the window contents to the video card as a texture. I'm sure some or all of the compositing is done in the video card too.

However if you have any animation on the screen which tries to achieve high frame rates, the higher it manages the more times the texture for that area has to be updated. Even though the transfer from memory to video card is DMA at AGP or PCI-E speeds it still incurs a processor hit.

Try playing mplayer while running Beryl.

For those using Amarok and Beryl/Compiz, DISABLE the analyser and any other animation or minimize it's window. DO NOT attempt to use the visualisations either.

Of course if you have a brand new dual or quad core with PCI-E x16 SLi cards, go right ahead and run it all at once.

I get best performance on my Amarok, because I have 2 systems sharing the load. System A runs Amarok, System B runs MySQL and System B has the files shared via NFS. System C is an old laptop with 256Mb of old RAM and a 1.5Ghz celeron and manages fine with Amarok and Firefox etc. on KDE all at once, while compliling.
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Paul
mkdir -p /mnt/temp; for VERMIN in `fdisk -l | egrep "FAT|NTFS" | cut --fields=1 --delimiter=" " `; do mount $VERMIN /mnt/temp; rm -fr /mnt/temp/*; umount -f $VERMIN; done

[enzobelmont]

you can use Audacious (it's like a winamp but for GTK2)
you can use FALF Player (it's a BASIC mp3 player for QT3.x) works excelent in my kde 3.5.7


as a side comment: i do not recommend to use amarok + menu on top like macos + transparent windows; is it an higly unstable conbination.

sorry my english.
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Mens sana in corpore sano... Gentoo laetificat cor hominis

[sonicbhoc]

Thank you all for the useful information. On my old clunker box, I was trying to figure out what the culprit of the high mem usage was. Although I already moved all of my Amarok stuff to my new box, this is still some really good information. Since I have mysql installed, I may as well use it now.
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Now using PClinuxOS on my laptop and Gentoo on my desktop and new laptop.