On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, Phil Deane wrote: > when I write at 16x I seem to be using 75% of my processor (an AMD XP 2000+) > which is about that the same amount as I used when I had a p3 800. Is it > because I am not using buffers?
For a general "why is my computer being slow", you can't beat a good vmstat (I generally go for "vmstat 2", ignoring the first line). In this case, the last three columns are the most relevant. They show the percentage of time spent in user-land, kernel-land and "idle". If that 75% is spent in kernel, then its having difficulty reading and/or writing data. Are the drives really ATAPI ones, masquerading as SCSI? That might be the cause of the problem. Another possibility is somehow DMA for the SCSI (or IDE) channel hasn't been enabled. Have you checked dmesg for things not being configured correctly? If instead, 75% is spent in user-land, top will show you which application it is (but you can guess which one ;). If this is the case, you've found some limitation with cdrdao. Unless there's some "don't use lots of CPU" option, you're stuck. I doubt any lack of buffers would be causing the problem. Buffers only help if you read the same area multiple times, which I'm guessing you're not doing. HTH Paul. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Particle Physics (Theory & Experimental) Groups Dr Paul Millar Department of Physics and Astronomy [EMAIL PROTECTED] University of Glasgow [EMAIL PROTECTED] Glasgow, G12 8QQ, Scotland http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/paulm +44 (0)141 330 4717 A54C A9FC 6A77 1664 2E4E 90E3 FFD2 704B BF0F 03E9 -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- _______________________________________________ Scottish mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/scottish
