ehlo Is there any way to "optimize" a system for more multi-tasking orientated desktop usage? I notice when a lot of hard disk or network activity takes place, other tasks slow down noticeably. Of course it is pretty logical for this happens, but sometimes, xmms just "plops" for a small amount of time, you hear a very short interruption of the music. I can reproduce it when you perform a system upgrade with pacman with a lot of packages being upgraded. Is there a possible way to "advantage" certain processes (by altering their nice-value) upon launching? So by default xmms gets a higher priority than other processes.
Maybe there are some kernel options that can be adjusted to attain a more responsive desktop? Timer interval (IIRC the default was 1000 Hz?)? Different IO scheduler? Other kernel options? As far as my hardware goes it should be just fine, the soundcard is a sb live with hardware mixer, the network card is an Intel gigabit card. Motherboard is equipped with a VIA chipset with one SATA drive attached to the onboard controller. I have considered the possibility of my PCI bus running out of bandwith but I presume it nearly impossible. Playing mp3 from NFS shares doesn't really use alot of bandwith (like 192 kilobits per second average) on the network card, transferring it to the soundcard shouldn't be a lot too. However the drive attached to the onboard SATA controller is a WD Raptor 10k rpm drive, which could easily flood the PCI bus when reading from it's cache memory. But this ofcourse shouldn't be a problem because the VIA chipset runs it's SATA controller at 66 Mhz together with V-link (similar to intel "quad pumped" front side busses) to achieve a bandwith of > 500 megabytes per second from the southbridge to the northbridge. So I rule out the hardware being the bottleneck for skipping music. What disturbs me most is that I cannot recall similar issues in my windoze days. Not that it bothers me much, it happens every once in a blue moon, under stressful situations the music "plops" as described above. However, I would like an overall more responsive desktop system, so any tips would be appreciated. Thanks Glenn (PS: Yes, a Dual Core CPU would give a huge increase in multitasking responsiveness, but let's leave that option out for now.) _______________________________________________ arch mailing list [email protected] http://www.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch
