Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Mark Knecht writes: Anything in there show network through-put per process? I've been looking for a way to monitor what's going to each of my VMs? net-analyzer/nethogs does that. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Michael Mol wrote: On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:58 PM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: [about showing which processes use how much swap] Michael Mol writes: [...] sys-process/htop Huh? I only see the total amount of swap being used, but no entry per process. Hit F2, and go down to 'columns'. Anything per-process found under /proc can be added as a column. Whoa! This is amazing, I did not know that htop can do all this. Thanks! But I still cannot get it to display the swap used by processes. When I add NSWAP and CNSWAP columns, they are not displayed. I found some information on that, looks to me like this is not really supported: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/479953/how-to-find-out-which-processes-are-swapping-in-linux http://wiki.directi.com/display/tu/Understanding+Processes+in+Linux Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 6:04 PM, Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:58 PM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: SNIP sys-process/htop Huh? I only see the total amount of swap being used, but no entry per process. Hit F2, and go down to 'columns'. Anything per-process found under /proc can be added as a column. -- :wq Anything in there show network through-put per process? I've been looking for a way to monitor what's going to each of my VMs? Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 9:51 AM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 6:04 PM, Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:58 PM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: SNIP sys-process/htop Huh? I only see the total amount of swap being used, but no entry per process. Hit F2, and go down to 'columns'. Anything per-process found under /proc can be added as a column. Anything in there show network through-put per process? I've been looking for a way to monitor what's going to each of my VMs? NAFAIK. Though if you get a kernel patch that gets per-process socket auditing added, then it should show up. :) I usually use iftop for watching flows. There's another tool I installed which handles some things (such as IPv6) better, but inara and kaylee are still down, so I can't peek at their world files to find out what it was. -- :wq
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 7:13 AM, Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 9:51 AM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 6:04 PM, Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:58 PM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: SNIP sys-process/htop Huh? I only see the total amount of swap being used, but no entry per process. Hit F2, and go down to 'columns'. Anything per-process found under /proc can be added as a column. Anything in there show network through-put per process? I've been looking for a way to monitor what's going to each of my VMs? NAFAIK. Though if you get a kernel patch that gets per-process socket auditing added, then it should show up. :) I usually use iftop for watching flows. There's another tool I installed which handles some things (such as IPv6) better, but inara and kaylee are still down, so I can't peek at their world files to find out what it was. -- :wq Thanks. iftop is interesting but seems more focused on the provider of the media source and less on the sink. I also use nettop to watch overall bitrates but I suspect you have that one also. Assume I have 3 VMs running and they are all streaming media. VM1-Netflix, VM2-Hulu, VM3-Amazon, etc. What I'm really interested in is something that would tell me how much bandwidth each VM is getting. Per-process would almost certainly do that, and maybe that's what I'll eventually have to do, but I'm hoping to find some little app that maybe someone has put together. Thanks, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs [SOLVED, sort of]
Paul Hartman writes: On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 8:40 PM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Finally, I found something. It's Dolphin! [...] Now, would this be an MPlayer problem, or one of Dolphin? I wonder if Dolphin is generating thumbnails/preview indexes at the same time you're trying to play, causing resource contention. Sometimes it does that, but that would happen when I play from the command line, too. And now it even works from Dolphin, when it is set to open mplayer in a terminal. So this cannot be the problem. And even if it were, avoiding thumbnails would be a bad workaround only, such operations should not affect video playback. Maybe this is somehow related to the other problem I had with mplayer2 only, using 100% CPU when idle, only when started from a file manager. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs [SOLVED, sort of]
On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 8:40 PM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Finally, I found something. It's Dolphin! I've done some longer testing, always playing the same video parallel with a dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/10G bs=1M count=1, in mplayer, for a minute, several times. When I do this by opening the file in Dolphin, I get about 15 interruptions, some for longer than a second. Started on the command line, there are very few, I can play the video for minutes without a gap. Hooray! In KDE, I usually play videos by opening them in Dolphin. I exchanged 'mplayer %U' by 'xterm -T MPLAYER -e mplayer %U' in the settings, now mplayer runs in a terminal, and all is fine. I created a window rule so the terminal automatically minimizes. Cool! It only happens in mplayer and mplayer2. Other players work fine, but I like mplayer best, and prefer to run it without any window decoration. Now, would this be an MPlayer problem, or one of Dolphin? I wonder if Dolphin is generating thumbnails/preview indexes at the same time you're trying to play, causing resource contention. I wonder if you can disable thumbnail generation by Dolphin or remove the association it has with video files and mplayer.
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs [SOLVED, sort of]
On Sat, 12 May 2012 11:41:33 -0400 Norman Invasion invasivenor...@gmail.com wrote: On 12 May 2012 11:05, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Norman Invasion writes: On 11 May 2012 21:40, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Finally, I found something. It's Dolphin! [...] Apologies: I haven't followed this thread from the beginning, Which was quite long ago :) but do you have any advanced power management features enabled (especially hard drive related)? My drives spin down after 30 minutes of idle time, but this never happens for the system drive. The CPU is set to throttle down from 3600 MHz to 1400 MHz with the ondemand governor, but changing to performance governor makes no change. When I pull the power cord on my lap-top, it goes into all kinds of nutty power-saving and mplayer has long pauses while the drive spins back up. Yeah, but those pauses are much longer than the small interruptions that are a fraction of a second mostly, and do not happen 15 times per minute. And it only happens when MPlayer is started from Dolphin. Well, mainly, when there is much system load, I also had small interruptions when I run mplayer from the command line, but they are much much less frequent, and do not happen under normal circumstances, like when doing emerges while playing videos. I'm just recalling that I get stuttering audio in freebsd, which is caused by what-I-don't-know, but only happens when the CPU load is low. Firing up burncpu or doing useless recompiles ameliorates it. I was getting stuttering audio from a sizeable % of my .avi files served from a FreeBSD NAS. The likely cause became obvious when I noticed that it was only on .avi files - all real containers were fine[1]. mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy -of avi -o new_file old_file fixed it permanently. I'm won't go so far as to say this might apply to your issue, but sometimes the simplest things are the actual causes :-) [1] .avi files are notorious for this shit. It's what happens when you are Microsoft and you release any old crappy format without consulting the other experts out there (who will always outnumber you) -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs [SOLVED, sort of]
On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 4:56 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: [1] .avi files are notorious for this shit. It's what happens when you are Microsoft and you release any old crappy format without consulting the other experts out there (who will always outnumber you) Which better container formats were available at the time AVI was released (1992)? The only contemporary container format I'm aware of is RIFF, which came out in 1988. MPEG-1 didn't come out until 1993, which was the same year the Ogg project started. Real's stuff didn't come out until 1995. Matroska was announced a decade later, in 2005. Matroska, MP4 and even OGG are nicer container formats, sure, but they weren't around yet. And even with any of them, it's perfectly possible to accidentally get A/V desync or stuttering if you don't mux your streams properly. (This post draws heavily on Wikipedia for date information, and dates may be considered only as accurate as Wikipedia...) -- :wq
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs [SOLVED, sort of]
On Sun, 13 May 2012 14:12:04 -0400 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 4:56 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: [1] .avi files are notorious for this shit. It's what happens when you are Microsoft and you release any old crappy format without consulting the other experts out there (who will always outnumber you) Which better container formats were available at the time AVI was released (1992)? The only contemporary container format I'm aware of is RIFF, which came out in 1988. MPEG-1 didn't come out until 1993, which was the same year the Ogg project started. Real's stuff didn't come out until 1995. Matroska was announced a decade later, in 2005. Matroska, MP4 and even OGG are nicer container formats, sure, but they weren't around yet. And even with any of them, it's perfectly possible to accidentally get A/V desync or stuttering if you don't mux your streams properly. (This post draws heavily on Wikipedia for date information, and dates may be considered only as accurate as Wikipedia...) You missed the essence of my post entirely. -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs [SOLVED, sort of]
On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 4:53 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, 13 May 2012 14:12:04 -0400 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 4:56 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: [1] .avi files are notorious for this shit. It's what happens when you are Microsoft and you release any old crappy format without consulting the other experts out there (who will always outnumber you) Which better container formats were available at the time AVI was released (1992)? The only contemporary container format I'm aware of is RIFF, which came out in 1988. MPEG-1 didn't come out until 1993, which was the same year the Ogg project started. Real's stuff didn't come out until 1995. Matroska was announced a decade later, in 2005. Matroska, MP4 and even OGG are nicer container formats, sure, but they weren't around yet. And even with any of them, it's perfectly possible to accidentally get A/V desync or stuttering if you don't mux your streams properly. (This post draws heavily on Wikipedia for date information, and dates may be considered only as accurate as Wikipedia...) You missed the essence of my post entirely. Anti-Microsoft snark? I thought I was calling you on it. -- :wq
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs [SOLVED, sort of]
On Sun, 13 May 2012 17:01:07 -0400 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 4:53 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, 13 May 2012 14:12:04 -0400 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 4:56 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: [1] .avi files are notorious for this shit. It's what happens when you are Microsoft and you release any old crappy format without consulting the other experts out there (who will always outnumber you) Which better container formats were available at the time AVI was released (1992)? The only contemporary container format I'm aware of is RIFF, which came out in 1988. MPEG-1 didn't come out until 1993, which was the same year the Ogg project started. Real's stuff didn't come out until 1995. Matroska was announced a decade later, in 2005. Matroska, MP4 and even OGG are nicer container formats, sure, but they weren't around yet. And even with any of them, it's perfectly possible to accidentally get A/V desync or stuttering if you don't mux your streams properly. (This post draws heavily on Wikipedia for date information, and dates may be considered only as accurate as Wikipedia...) You missed the essence of my post entirely. Anti-Microsoft snark? I thought I was calling you on it. I said .avi is a crappy format, and it is, that much is obvious to anyone who understands the simple basics of what a container should do. It would have been obvious to the .avi developers then. And yet it somehow made it's way to market and got used extensively You asked what alternatives were available. That is not a question I asked. It matters nothing that the public used .avi so much (they had precious little in the way of choice). So whether they had alternatives or not is irrelevant. The entire gist of my post was about how .avi as it stands is crappy and should never have been released by an entity with the engineering clout of Microsoft as they don't have the excuse of being one dude in Mom's basement who didn't know better. They really should have known better. -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs [SOLVED, sort of]
On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 5:33 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, 13 May 2012 17:01:07 -0400 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 4:53 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, 13 May 2012 14:12:04 -0400 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 4:56 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: [1] .avi files are notorious for this shit. It's what happens when you are Microsoft and you release any old crappy format without consulting the other experts out there (who will always outnumber you) Which better container formats were available at the time AVI was released (1992)? The only contemporary container format I'm aware of is RIFF, which came out in 1988. MPEG-1 didn't come out until 1993, which was the same year the Ogg project started. Real's stuff didn't come out until 1995. Matroska was announced a decade later, in 2005. Matroska, MP4 and even OGG are nicer container formats, sure, but they weren't around yet. And even with any of them, it's perfectly possible to accidentally get A/V desync or stuttering if you don't mux your streams properly. (This post draws heavily on Wikipedia for date information, and dates may be considered only as accurate as Wikipedia...) You missed the essence of my post entirely. Anti-Microsoft snark? I thought I was calling you on it. I said .avi is a crappy format, and it is, that much is obvious to anyone who understands the simple basics of what a container should do. The MPEG group had only been formed four years prior to AVI's release, and didn't release their first standard until a year later. Meanwhile, Microsoft needed a video file format that: 1) Was a file format that sat on disk 2) Synchronized audio and video 3) Integrated cleanly with their being-developed operating system (AVI is very closely related to the Video for Windows API. It's worth noting that WMF, another Microsoft format from this time, is essentially a serialized form of their drawing primitives.) 4) Ran smoothly on an 80386 at 33MHz with a 16-bit, 8MHz data bus between the CPU and persistent storage. With the exception of perhaps (3), those are the basics. Consider that this was released in 1992, and then consider that it had probably been under development for at least a couple years prior. I won't disagree that AVI is a crappy format by today's standards, and that it should be avoided where possible, but what you consider simple and obvious today was *new* at the time, and so not simple and obvious. It would have been obvious to the .avi developers then. And yet it somehow made it's way to market and got used extensively You asked what alternatives were available. That is not a question I asked. It matters nothing that the public used .avi so much (they had precious little in the way of choice). So whether they had alternatives or not is irrelevant. It's entirely relevant if you want to consider whether not the expertise to come up with a 2012-modern format *existed* in the lead-up time to 1992. The entire gist of my post was about how .avi as it stands is crappy and should never have been released by an entity with the engineering clout of Microsoft as they don't have the excuse of being one dude in Mom's basement who didn't know better. They really should have known better. Seriously, why? Why do you think that the entire engineering clout of a company which hadn't yet taken over the desktop market(!) would be focused on perfecting AVI, one piece of a large, already-late-to-market product? They had a bunch of difficult things to pay attention to, such as mixing protected-mode and real-mode applications on hardware in a task-switching environment, and working around compatibility for programs whose developers still assumed they had full run of the system. On a 386. -- :wq
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs [SOLVED, sort of]
On Sun, 13 May 2012 18:03:59 -0400 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 5:33 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, 13 May 2012 17:01:07 -0400 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 4:53 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, 13 May 2012 14:12:04 -0400 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 4:56 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: [1] .avi files are notorious for this shit. It's what happens when you are Microsoft and you release any old crappy format without consulting the other experts out there (who will always outnumber you) Which better container formats were available at the time AVI was released (1992)? The only contemporary container format I'm aware of is RIFF, which came out in 1988. MPEG-1 didn't come out until 1993, which was the same year the Ogg project started. Real's stuff didn't come out until 1995. Matroska was announced a decade later, in 2005. Matroska, MP4 and even OGG are nicer container formats, sure, but they weren't around yet. And even with any of them, it's perfectly possible to accidentally get A/V desync or stuttering if you don't mux your streams properly. (This post draws heavily on Wikipedia for date information, and dates may be considered only as accurate as Wikipedia...) You missed the essence of my post entirely. Anti-Microsoft snark? I thought I was calling you on it. I said .avi is a crappy format, and it is, that much is obvious to anyone who understands the simple basics of what a container should do. The MPEG group had only been formed four years prior to AVI's release, and didn't release their first standard until a year later. Meanwhile, Microsoft needed a video file format that: 1) Was a file format that sat on disk 2) Synchronized audio and video This is the part they got wrong. Would you not agree that this is the second-most important feature required, where the ability to actually play the audio/video at all is the first? Getting that wrong is to me akin to building a car and forgetting to provide it with an adequate means of stopping. There are many other things that can be forgiven where one would need a predictive crystal ball, but needing time sync information in the container is just simply self-evident. 3) Integrated cleanly with their being-developed operating system (AVI is very closely related to the Video for Windows API. It's worth noting that WMF, another Microsoft format from this time, is essentially a serialized form of their drawing primitives.) 4) Ran smoothly on an 80386 at 33MHz with a 16-bit, 8MHz data bus between the CPU and persistent storage. With the exception of perhaps (3), those are the basics. Consider that this was released in 1992, and then consider that it had probably been under development for at least a couple years prior. I won't disagree that AVI is a crappy format by today's standards, and that it should be avoided where possible, but what you consider simple and obvious today was *new* at the time, and so not simple and obvious. I'm not talking about today's standards. I'm talking about 1992 standards. It's not reasonable to expect MS devs to anticipate algorithms that did not exist then, or hardware that was 10 years away, or even that the internet would be what it is. I do expect devs to get right aspects of their software that will be used right at the time it is released. It would have been obvious to the .avi developers then. And yet it somehow made it's way to market and got used extensively You asked what alternatives were available. That is not a question I asked. It matters nothing that the public used .avi so much (they had precious little in the way of choice). So whether they had alternatives or not is irrelevant. It's entirely relevant if you want to consider whether not the expertise to come up with a 2012-modern format *existed* in the lead-up time to 1992. Again, I'm not talking about 2012 The entire gist of my post was about how .avi as it stands is crappy and should never have been released by an entity with the engineering clout of Microsoft as they don't have the excuse of being one dude in Mom's basement who didn't know better. They really should have known better. Seriously, why? Why do you think that the entire engineering clout of a company which hadn't yet taken over the desktop market(!) would be focused on perfecting AVI, one piece of a large, already-late-to-market product? They had a bunch of difficult things to pay attention to, such as mixing protected-mode and real-mode applications on hardware in a task-switching environment, and working around compatibility for programs whose developers still assumed they had full run of the system. On a 386. No, I expect them to get the basics
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs [SOLVED, sort of]
On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 7:27 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, 13 May 2012 18:03:59 -0400 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 5:33 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, 13 May 2012 17:01:07 -0400 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 4:53 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, 13 May 2012 14:12:04 -0400 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 4:56 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: [1] .avi files are notorious for this shit. It's what happens when you are Microsoft and you release any old crappy format without consulting the other experts out there (who will always outnumber you) Which better container formats were available at the time AVI was released (1992)? The only contemporary container format I'm aware of is RIFF, which came out in 1988. MPEG-1 didn't come out until 1993, which was the same year the Ogg project started. Real's stuff didn't come out until 1995. Matroska was announced a decade later, in 2005. Matroska, MP4 and even OGG are nicer container formats, sure, but they weren't around yet. And even with any of them, it's perfectly possible to accidentally get A/V desync or stuttering if you don't mux your streams properly. (This post draws heavily on Wikipedia for date information, and dates may be considered only as accurate as Wikipedia...) You missed the essence of my post entirely. Anti-Microsoft snark? I thought I was calling you on it. I said .avi is a crappy format, and it is, that much is obvious to anyone who understands the simple basics of what a container should do. The MPEG group had only been formed four years prior to AVI's release, and didn't release their first standard until a year later. Meanwhile, Microsoft needed a video file format that: 1) Was a file format that sat on disk 2) Synchronized audio and video This is the part they got wrong. Would you not agree that this is the second-most important feature required, where the ability to actually play the audio/video at all is the first? You're going to have to go into detail. Last I checked, old versions of Windows shipped with AVI files for their animations, and those AVI files played fine. So it _sounds_ like they're able to play video, at least. And my largish collection of AMVs and videos I've put together myself suggest that AVI can play synchronized audio and video. Getting that wrong is to me akin to building a car and forgetting to provide it with an adequate means of stopping. There are many other things that can be forgiven where one would need a predictive crystal ball, but needing time sync information in the container is just simply self-evident. Only if you anticipate your audio and video streams deviating from intended usages. AVI is used for far more things than it was designed to do. Reading deeper into its history, it sounds like it was embraced and extended by entities outside of Microsoft to do things it wasn't designed for in the first place. So expecting it to handle VBR audio or video with predictive frames is kinda like putting a supercharger in a Pinto and complaining when it winds up sitting on its own roof. 3) Integrated cleanly with their being-developed operating system (AVI is very closely related to the Video for Windows API. It's worth noting that WMF, another Microsoft format from this time, is essentially a serialized form of their drawing primitives.) 4) Ran smoothly on an 80386 at 33MHz with a 16-bit, 8MHz data bus between the CPU and persistent storage. With the exception of perhaps (3), those are the basics. Consider that this was released in 1992, and then consider that it had probably been under development for at least a couple years prior. I won't disagree that AVI is a crappy format by today's standards, and that it should be avoided where possible, but what you consider simple and obvious today was *new* at the time, and so not simple and obvious. I'm not talking about today's standards. I'm talking about 1992 standards. _Those standards didn't exist._ That's been my key point. Yes, there was SMPTE, but that's for video recording and production houses, and that was certainly not a planned usage for AVI. It's not reasonable to expect MS devs to anticipate algorithms that did not exist then, or hardware that was 10 years away, or even that the internet would be what it is. I do expect devs to get right aspects of their software that will be used right at the time it is released. The earliest AVI files I'm aware of were sequences of RLE bitmaps, and the code doing playback knew *exactly* what the framerate was, because it knew what the video was for. Framerate support was added by external parties because external parties wanted to extend AVI for their own purposes. For that
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs [SOLVED, sort of]
On 11 May 2012 21:40, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Finally, I found something. It's Dolphin! I've done some longer testing, always playing the same video parallel with a dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/10G bs=1M count=1, in mplayer, for a minute, several times. When I do this by opening the file in Dolphin, I get about 15 interruptions, some for longer than a second. Started on the command line, there are very few, I can play the video for minutes without a gap. Hooray! In KDE, I usually play videos by opening them in Dolphin. I exchanged 'mplayer %U' by 'xterm -T MPLAYER -e mplayer %U' in the settings, now mplayer runs in a terminal, and all is fine. I created a window rule so the terminal automatically minimizes. Cool! It only happens in mplayer and mplayer2. Other players work fine, but I like mplayer best, and prefer to run it without any window decoration. Now, would this be an MPlayer problem, or one of Dolphin? Apologies: I haven't followed this thread from the beginning, but do you have any advanced power management features enabled (especially hard drive related)? When I pull the power cord on my lap-top, it goes into all kinds of nutty power-saving and mplayer has long pauses while the drive spins back up.
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs [SOLVED, sort of]
Norman Invasion writes: On 11 May 2012 21:40, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Finally, I found something. It's Dolphin! [...] Apologies: I haven't followed this thread from the beginning, Which was quite long ago :) but do you have any advanced power management features enabled (especially hard drive related)? My drives spin down after 30 minutes of idle time, but this never happens for the system drive. The CPU is set to throttle down from 3600 MHz to 1400 MHz with the ondemand governor, but changing to performance governor makes no change. When I pull the power cord on my lap-top, it goes into all kinds of nutty power-saving and mplayer has long pauses while the drive spins back up. Yeah, but those pauses are much longer than the small interruptions that are a fraction of a second mostly, and do not happen 15 times per minute. And it only happens when MPlayer is started from Dolphin. Well, mainly, when there is much system load, I also had small interruptions when I run mplayer from the command line, but they are much much less frequent, and do not happen under normal circumstances, like when doing emerges while playing videos. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs [SOLVED, sort of]
On 12 May 2012 11:05, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Norman Invasion writes: On 11 May 2012 21:40, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Finally, I found something. It's Dolphin! [...] Apologies: I haven't followed this thread from the beginning, Which was quite long ago :) but do you have any advanced power management features enabled (especially hard drive related)? My drives spin down after 30 minutes of idle time, but this never happens for the system drive. The CPU is set to throttle down from 3600 MHz to 1400 MHz with the ondemand governor, but changing to performance governor makes no change. When I pull the power cord on my lap-top, it goes into all kinds of nutty power-saving and mplayer has long pauses while the drive spins back up. Yeah, but those pauses are much longer than the small interruptions that are a fraction of a second mostly, and do not happen 15 times per minute. And it only happens when MPlayer is started from Dolphin. Well, mainly, when there is much system load, I also had small interruptions when I run mplayer from the command line, but they are much much less frequent, and do not happen under normal circumstances, like when doing emerges while playing videos. I'm just recalling that I get stuttering audio in freebsd, which is caused by what-I-don't-know, but only happens when the CPU load is low. Firing up burncpu or doing useless recompiles ameliorates it.
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Dale writes:
Is there a way to find out what is using swap? Maybe something related
to the video is on swap which at times can be slow, certainly slower
than ram.
I have always wondered how to find this out myself.
Me too, so when I had this sudden swap problem for the first time, I
searched for a method to do this and found a script here:
http://northernmost.org/blog/find-out-what-is-using-your-swap/
There's lots of information for all processes in /proc/pid/. Trying to
read /proc/pid/mem (I think it was this file) in mc was not such a good
idea, the system froze with lots of HD activity, and after half an hour I
rebooted with Alt-SysRq-{K,E,I,S,U,B}.
I improved the script a little, it allows sorting by PID, size and name,
and can restrict the output to specific processes or show only those
using more swap than specified. If interested you can download it here:
http://www.wonkology.org/utils/getswap
You need to be root to see processes you do not own.
But of course, I forgot to run it after the sudden swap problem happened
lately. So I still do not know what was going on there. I'll wait for the
next time it happens.
Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:34 PM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote:
Dale writes:
Is there a way to find out what is using swap? Maybe something related
to the video is on swap which at times can be slow, certainly slower
than ram.
I have always wondered how to find this out myself.
Me too, so when I had this sudden swap problem for the first time, I
searched for a method to do this and found a script here:
http://northernmost.org/blog/find-out-what-is-using-your-swap/
There's lots of information for all processes in /proc/pid/. Trying to
read /proc/pid/mem (I think it was this file) in mc was not such a good
idea, the system froze with lots of HD activity, and after half an hour I
rebooted with Alt-SysRq-{K,E,I,S,U,B}.
I improved the script a little, it allows sorting by PID, size and name,
and can restrict the output to specific processes or show only those
using more swap than specified. If interested you can download it here:
http://www.wonkology.org/utils/getswap
You need to be root to see processes you do not own.
But of course, I forgot to run it after the sudden swap problem happened
lately. So I still do not know what was going on there. I'll wait for the
next time it happens.
Wonko
sys-process/htop
--
:wq
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Michael Mol writes:
On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:34 PM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org
wrote:
Dale writes:
Is there a way to find out what is using swap? Maybe something
related to the video is on swap which at times can be slow,
certainly slower than ram.
I have always wondered how to find this out myself.
Me too, so when I had this sudden swap problem for the first time, I
searched for a method to do this and found a script here:
http://northernmost.org/blog/find-out-what-is-using-your-swap/
There's lots of information for all processes in /proc/pid/. Trying
to read /proc/pid/mem (I think it was this file) in mc was not such
a good idea, the system froze with lots of HD activity, and after
half an hour I rebooted with Alt-SysRq-{K,E,I,S,U,B}.
I improved the script a little, it allows sorting by PID, size and
name, and can restrict the output to specific processes or show only
those using more swap than specified. If interested you can download
it here: http://www.wonkology.org/utils/getswap
You need to be root to see processes you do not own.
But of course, I forgot to run it after the sudden swap problem
happened lately. So I still do not know what was going on there. I'll
wait for the next time it happens.
Wonko
sys-process/htop
Huh? I only see the total amount of swap being used, but no entry per
process.
Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:58 PM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote:
Michael Mol writes:
On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:34 PM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org
wrote:
Dale writes:
Is there a way to find out what is using swap? Maybe something
related to the video is on swap which at times can be slow,
certainly slower than ram.
I have always wondered how to find this out myself.
Me too, so when I had this sudden swap problem for the first time, I
searched for a method to do this and found a script here:
http://northernmost.org/blog/find-out-what-is-using-your-swap/
There's lots of information for all processes in /proc/pid/. Trying
to read /proc/pid/mem (I think it was this file) in mc was not such
a good idea, the system froze with lots of HD activity, and after
half an hour I rebooted with Alt-SysRq-{K,E,I,S,U,B}.
I improved the script a little, it allows sorting by PID, size and
name, and can restrict the output to specific processes or show only
those using more swap than specified. If interested you can download
it here: http://www.wonkology.org/utils/getswap
You need to be root to see processes you do not own.
But of course, I forgot to run it after the sudden swap problem
happened lately. So I still do not know what was going on there. I'll
wait for the next time it happens.
Wonko
sys-process/htop
Huh? I only see the total amount of swap being used, but no entry per
process.
Hit F2, and go down to 'columns'. Anything per-process found under
/proc can be added as a column.
--
:wq
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs [SOLVED, sort of]
Finally, I found something. It's Dolphin! I've done some longer testing, always playing the same video parallel with a dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/10G bs=1M count=1, in mplayer, for a minute, several times. When I do this by opening the file in Dolphin, I get about 15 interruptions, some for longer than a second. Started on the command line, there are very few, I can play the video for minutes without a gap. Hooray! In KDE, I usually play videos by opening them in Dolphin. I exchanged 'mplayer %U' by 'xterm -T MPLAYER -e mplayer %U' in the settings, now mplayer runs in a terminal, and all is fine. I created a window rule so the terminal automatically minimizes. Cool! It only happens in mplayer and mplayer2. Other players work fine, but I like mplayer best, and prefer to run it without any window decoration. Now, would this be an MPlayer problem, or one of Dolphin? Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Adam Carter wrote: Is there a way to find out what is using swap? Maybe something related to the video is on swap which at times can be slow, certainly slower than ram. I have always wondered how to find this out myself. Well the OS uses swap, i dont know if its possible to then tie that directly to a process. You can find out if swap is being at all using with vmstat; so= swap out, si=swap in. For example, watch the following when you view the video adam@proxy ~ $ vmstat -S M 3 procs ---memory-- ---swap-- -io -system-- cpu r b swpd free buff cache si sobibo in cs us sy id wa 0 0 0 1290379 6617002656 108 107 2 3 93 2 0 0 0 1290379 661700 115 87 91 0 0 100 0 0 0 0 1290379 661700 0 0 59 54 0 0 100 0 0 0 0 1290379 661700 0 7 72 73 0 0 100 0 I'm not the OP but posted a two part post that didn't quite come out like I expected. One for the OP to try to find out what was using swap, just in case it mattered. Two to ask how that is done in case he didn't know and for me since I don't know either. lol I was hoping for a command that says program foo is using X amount of swap but I guess not. Interesting that there isn't a real good tool for this. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Am 10.05.2012 05:59, schrieb Adam Carter: There's plenty of swap space available. With 16 G of RAM it should not be needed, but sometimes my load gets really really high, and when I can use the system again, there is 2-3 G of swap usage. I haven't found out yet what this is, it seems to happen when emerging things, maybe related to having 5 G tmpfs for portage, but when it happened the last time only 100 M were being used. Yeah so it wont be swap related. This sounds more like the desktop responsiveness issue discussed a while back. It might be worth googling that (main issue was fixed in later kernels) http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=articleitem=linux_2637_videonum=1 There's other things that may help, ie CONFIG_HZ_1000=y CONFIG_HZ=1000 Does the CONFIG_HZ setting today really have that much of an impact? I mean with tickles kernels and high res timers it should matter that much, or am I wrong? Playing video is not really a low-latency-multimedia-app, on the other hand: you never really know :)
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 8:00 PM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Neil Bothwick writes: On Wed, 9 May 2012 21:44:19 +0200, Alex Schuster wrote: I guess I could remove anything running on my KDE desktop one by one, including plasmoids, and see if playback gets better. But not now, I finally have to actually do some work. I recently experienced slowdowns and delays with KDE. It turned out I had inadvertently disabled swap (I'd rearranged my partitions and not updated fstab). As soon as I gave it some swap space the delays disappeared. There's plenty of swap space available. With 16 G of RAM it should not be needed, but sometimes my load gets really really high, and when I can use the system again, there is 2-3 G of swap usage. I haven't found out yet what this is, it seems to happen when emerging things, maybe related to having 5 G tmpfs for portage, but when it happened the last time only 100 M were being used. Hi, I realize this thread is bigger than an encyclopedia by now, so I apologize if this has already been suggested. :) I'm curious if you look at /proc/interrupts if the disk with I/O problems is sharing interrupt with some other device. Maybe there is a conflict of some sort. On my motherboard, one of the SATA controllers shares an interrupt with the soundcard, for example.
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Paul Hartman writes: I realize this thread is bigger than an encyclopedia by now, so I apologize if this has already been suggested. :) Well, I'm happy for any input on this :) This problem is really annoying. I'm curious if you look at /proc/interrupts if the disk with I/O problems is sharing interrupt with some other device. Maybe there is a conflict of some sort. On my motherboard, one of the SATA controllers shares an interrupt with the soundcard, for example. Good point. But this does not seem to be the case. The only lines that have multiple entries are two interrupts with ohci_hdc and snd_hda_intel, that should be no problem. The two ahci entries have their own interrupts. I did not yet find the time to remove the plasmoids (all is fine in other window managers, or for another user with a plain unconfigured KDE desktop), today I dealt with a horrible and weird qt upgrade experience on another PC. Finally I was able to downgrade to 4.7, and at least stuff is working again there. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
I wrote: Mark Knecht writes: OK, fire up two terminals. In one run top, hit 1 z so you see all your CPUs and then watch CPU usage. In the second terminal su to root and run iotop -o. Now, watch for a few minutes and get a feel for what's going on when video is not running. Then start your video and watch IO usage and CPU usage. Where's the problem? Once you get an idea where the bottleneck is we can address what a solution might be. In general, if the CPUs aren't maxed out and it's an I/O problem then usually a bit more buffering is a simple solution. Other more draconian solution might be a real-time kernel with a player (if there is one) that is set up for real-time playback. Looking forward to hearing your test results. Thanks for your support, Mark! I did this already, but sometimes I do not notice anything. I guess it's short I/O operations in that case. CPU load is not the problem, and it happens for both high-quality videos and small ones. Currently iotop shows stuff like kjournald, kworker, kdeinit4, akonadiserver, firefox. And lots of virtuoso-t and nepomuk when I enable indexing again, which I just suspended. And mplayer of course, it shows up in about every 2nd redisplay, which happens every second. Well... but when I do the same in the other window manager, it seems I see fewer processes then. Are they mostly suspended when I am on another display? I watched for longer now, and this does not seem to be true. And I should fire up the same stuff (Firefox, Chromium, maybe KDEPIM stuff) in the other WM and see if this makes things worse. But I'll do this tomorrow. Thanks for the inspiration, though, at least I have something more to try now. I am running Enlightenment 0.16 in parallel now, with Firefox, Chromium, Kontact, Claws, Liferea, Amarok (which is doing a lot of I/OP stuff at the moment according to iotop), and Dolphin showing a large directory of multimedia files wit thumbnails. But I don't see akonadi related processes in iotop, that is unusual. I did the dd command to create more I/O. No gaps in video display at all. When I play the video from within KDE (running Konsoles, Konqueror, Dolphin and a lot of plasma stuff), I have gaps, and when I do the dd command, there are in the range of seconds. Even for some seconds after I canceled the dd. I also tried a fresh, unconfigured KDE session by another user. I've already done that, and there were also gaps in video playback, although it seems they were fewer. But this time, I was not able to reproduce them. Huh? I guess I could remove anything running on my KDE desktop one by one, including plasmoids, and see if playback gets better. But not now, I finally have to actually do some work. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On Wed, 9 May 2012 21:44:19 +0200, Alex Schuster wrote: I guess I could remove anything running on my KDE desktop one by one, including plasmoids, and see if playback gets better. But not now, I finally have to actually do some work. I recently experienced slowdowns and delays with KDE. It turned out I had inadvertently disabled swap (I'd rearranged my partitions and not updated fstab). As soon as I gave it some swap space the delays disappeared. -- Neil Bothwick Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Neil Bothwick writes: On Wed, 9 May 2012 21:44:19 +0200, Alex Schuster wrote: I guess I could remove anything running on my KDE desktop one by one, including plasmoids, and see if playback gets better. But not now, I finally have to actually do some work. I recently experienced slowdowns and delays with KDE. It turned out I had inadvertently disabled swap (I'd rearranged my partitions and not updated fstab). As soon as I gave it some swap space the delays disappeared. There's plenty of swap space available. With 16 G of RAM it should not be needed, but sometimes my load gets really really high, and when I can use the system again, there is 2-3 G of swap usage. I haven't found out yet what this is, it seems to happen when emerging things, maybe related to having 5 G tmpfs for portage, but when it happened the last time only 100 M were being used. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Alex Schuster wrote: Neil Bothwick writes: On Wed, 9 May 2012 21:44:19 +0200, Alex Schuster wrote: I guess I could remove anything running on my KDE desktop one by one, including plasmoids, and see if playback gets better. But not now, I finally have to actually do some work. I recently experienced slowdowns and delays with KDE. It turned out I had inadvertently disabled swap (I'd rearranged my partitions and not updated fstab). As soon as I gave it some swap space the delays disappeared. There's plenty of swap space available. With 16 G of RAM it should not be needed, but sometimes my load gets really really high, and when I can use the system again, there is 2-3 G of swap usage. I haven't found out yet what this is, it seems to happen when emerging things, maybe related to having 5 G tmpfs for portage, but when it happened the last time only 100 M were being used. Wonko Is there a way to find out what is using swap? Maybe something related to the video is on swap which at times can be slow, certainly slower than ram. I have always wondered how to find this out myself. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Is there a way to find out what is using swap? Maybe something related to the video is on swap which at times can be slow, certainly slower than ram. I have always wondered how to find this out myself. Well the OS uses swap, i dont know if its possible to then tie that directly to a process. You can find out if swap is being at all using with vmstat; so= swap out, si=swap in. For example, watch the following when you view the video adam@proxy ~ $ vmstat -S M 3 procs ---memory-- ---swap-- -io -system-- cpu r b swpd free buff cache si sobibo in cs us sy id wa 0 0 0 1290379 6617002656 108 107 2 3 93 2 0 0 0 1290379 661700 115 87 91 0 0 100 0 0 0 0 1290379 661700 0 0 59 54 0 0 100 0 0 0 0 1290379 661700 0 7 72 73 0 0 100 0
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
There's plenty of swap space available. With 16 G of RAM it should not be needed, but sometimes my load gets really really high, and when I can use the system again, there is 2-3 G of swap usage. I haven't found out yet what this is, it seems to happen when emerging things, maybe related to having 5 G tmpfs for portage, but when it happened the last time only 100 M were being used. Yeah so it wont be swap related. This sounds more like the desktop responsiveness issue discussed a while back. It might be worth googling that (main issue was fixed in later kernels) http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=articleitem=linux_2637_videonum=1 There's other things that may help, ie CONFIG_HZ_1000=y CONFIG_HZ=1000
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Also, there was a thread a good while back with this issue and their fix was to do a emerge -e world with everything optimized for their CPU and such. May be worth thinking about at least. Video playback and CPU optimisations go hand in hand. One video I have had for a long time, I could never play it at all on any of my computers and I could not beleive what I saw next... I got a new PC and thought to give it a try. It worked painfully, skipping and using 100% of one of my CPU cores. I was sad and thought this video might have been corrupt. After a wave of cleanup, I had removed all CPU optimisation flags from my make.conf (I was originally negating many, like -sse, etc, so I left it to my profile to choose what was needed) and recompiled everything. After that, the same movie played in the best quality I had ever seen and CPU usage was below 5% I was even able to open 12 movies (4x3) all playing at the same time (this was unthinkable before I optimized my system). Anyway, keep in mind that my particular starting scenario was that I had un-optimized it long ago! Good luck!
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Some while ago, I wrote: [ mplayer stutters when I/O is going on, even hangs for seconds when I do a dd if=/dev/zero of=somefile bs=1M ] Urs Schutz writes: Just an idea: Is the disk OK? Replace /dev/sda with your disk... [...] I had a bad disk here, which resulted in slow IO, but not complete failure. Smart detected this immediately. Sorry, I do not know how to check disks with LVM. Didn't you get errors in yslog then? I also thought about swapping the system drive - I have a larger backup drive, with nearly identical logical volumes on it, where I make backups with rdiffbackup. So even the content is identical, except for an additional rdiff-backup directory containing the increments. So all I have to do is to echange the two volume group names, reboot, and the system will run from the other drive. But I very much doubt this will help, transfer speed looks okay to me, around 100 MB/s with dd. I did it in another way. I created a large file system (LVM) on my 2nd drive, copied /, /usr, /var, /opt and /home over. My whole system is encrypted, but I omitted this, just to make sure this is not the bottleneck. Alas, no change. Another thing I tried was to change the SATA mode in my BIOS from AHCI to whatever the other option is. This did not help either. Now this is really annoying. I watch small clips mostly, and can live with that, and when I want to watch stuff with others, I copy the file to tmpfs, which seems to help a lot. But now I found another solution: NOT USING KDE. When X crashed (trying to make the old Unreal game play), I fired up another window manager, and when I played a video in there, there was no problem at all. So, I have another workaround. But does anyone have an idea, why running KDE is the problem? Disabling desktop effects does not help. I must be totally crazy because I still want to use KDE, despite the big trouble it gives me nearly every day. Yes, most things work fine now, but there are many many little problems, daily application crashes, and every time I log in I fear that the desktop won't come up. 8G of RAM was not enough to avoid swapping, so now I have 16G, that's fine, I no longer care about kwin using 1G of my RAM. Oh, and I no longer use KMail, after it ate thousands of mails I just wanted to move. No problem, they were not important, but I no longer trust the KDEPIM suite. And it seems the developers do not care about this, the bug report got no replies. But anyway. Any idea why it only happens with KDE? I will ask on the KDE mailing list, but I thought I post here first, maybe there's something Gentoo-specific going on here. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Am Montag, 7. Mai 2012, 14:41:34 schrieb Alex Schuster: Some while ago, I wrote: [ mplayer stutters when I/O is going on, even hangs for seconds when I do a dd if=/dev/zero of=somefile bs=1M ] Urs Schutz writes: Just an idea: Is the disk OK? Replace /dev/sda with your disk... [...] I had a bad disk here, which resulted in slow IO, but not complete failure. Smart detected this immediately. Sorry, I do not know how to check disks with LVM. Didn't you get errors in yslog then? I also thought about swapping the system drive - I have a larger backup drive, with nearly identical logical volumes on it, where I make backups with rdiffbackup. So even the content is identical, except for an additional rdiff-backup directory containing the increments. So all I have to do is to echange the two volume group names, reboot, and the system will run from the other drive. But I very much doubt this will help, transfer speed looks okay to me, around 100 MB/s with dd. I did it in another way. I created a large file system (LVM) on my 2nd drive, copied /, /usr, /var, /opt and /home over. My whole system is encrypted, but I omitted this, just to make sure this is not the bottleneck. Alas, no change. Another thing I tried was to change the SATA mode in my BIOS from AHCI to whatever the other option is. This did not help either. Now this is really annoying. I watch small clips mostly, and can live with that, and when I want to watch stuff with others, I copy the file to tmpfs, which seems to help a lot. But now I found another solution: NOT USING KDE. When X crashed (trying to make the old Unreal game play), I fired up another window manager, and when I played a video in there, there was no problem at all. So, I have another workaround. But does anyone have an idea, why running KDE is the problem? Disabling desktop effects does not help. nepomuk/virtuoso running in the background whenever you have more than 1 process doing IO linux sucks ass. Now, you write to a partition, nepomuk tries to index it (1 read) and your player reading the video file (2nd read). Interactivity is shot. Pause/kill nepomuk and look if it helps. For me the worst case is: writing lots of files on a usb device - sucks everywhere, even on a vt. -- #163933
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Am 07.05.2012 18:26, schrieb Volker Armin Hemmann: Am Montag, 7. Mai 2012, 14:41:34 schrieb Alex Schuster: Some while ago, I wrote: [ mplayer stutters when I/O is going on, even hangs for seconds when I do a dd if=/dev/zero of=somefile bs=1M ] Urs Schutz writes: Just an idea: Is the disk OK? Replace /dev/sda with your disk... [...] I had a bad disk here, which resulted in slow IO, but not complete failure. Smart detected this immediately. Sorry, I do not know how to check disks with LVM. Didn't you get errors in yslog then? I also thought about swapping the system drive - I have a larger backup drive, with nearly identical logical volumes on it, where I make backups with rdiffbackup. So even the content is identical, except for an additional rdiff-backup directory containing the increments. So all I have to do is to echange the two volume group names, reboot, and the system will run from the other drive. But I very much doubt this will help, transfer speed looks okay to me, around 100 MB/s with dd. I did it in another way. I created a large file system (LVM) on my 2nd drive, copied /, /usr, /var, /opt and /home over. My whole system is encrypted, but I omitted this, just to make sure this is not the bottleneck. Alas, no change. Another thing I tried was to change the SATA mode in my BIOS from AHCI to whatever the other option is. This did not help either. Now this is really annoying. I watch small clips mostly, and can live with that, and when I want to watch stuff with others, I copy the file to tmpfs, which seems to help a lot. But now I found another solution: NOT USING KDE. When X crashed (trying to make the old Unreal game play), I fired up another window manager, and when I played a video in there, there was no problem at all. So, I have another workaround. But does anyone have an idea, why running KDE is the problem? Disabling desktop effects does not help. nepomuk/virtuoso running in the background whenever you have more than 1 process doing IO linux sucks ass. Now, you write to a partition, nepomuk tries to index it (1 read) and your player reading the video file (2nd read). Interactivity is shot. Pause/kill nepomuk and look if it helps. For me the worst case is: writing lots of files on a usb device - sucks everywhere, even on a vt. Maybe changing the kernel io scheduler will help? # /usr/src/linux/Documentation/block/switching-sched.txt # /usr/src/linux/Documentation/block/deadline-iosched.txt # /usr/src/linux/Documentation/block/cfq-iosched.txt
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Am Montag, 7. Mai 2012, 18:44:05 schrieb Michael Hampicke: Maybe changing the kernel io scheduler will help? # /usr/src/linux/Documentation/block/switching-sched.txt # /usr/src/linux/Documentation/block/deadline-iosched.txt # /usr/src/linux/Documentation/block/cfq-iosched.txt nice idea - but that didn't help in the past. Why should it help now? The question is - why does disk IO make the mouse jerky and delays keyboard input? That is just idiotic. -- #163933
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
nice idea - but that didn't help in the past. Why should it help now? The question is - why does disk IO make the mouse jerky and delays keyboard input? That is just idiotic. It was just an idea, but maybe there's something wrong on the hardware side? Broken cable, hard drive about to die? Have to checked the SMART data of your hard drive lately (error log, relocate sector count). You can also run some tests with smartctl. Or monitor your IO with dstat or iotop. iotop tells you which app causes high io load. Or maybe you kernel is using some generic and slow driver for your ata controller instead of an optimized one? Personally I never had IO problems on linux unless theres was something wrong with either the hardware or the kernel driver. Hope that helps.
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Am Montag, 7. Mai 2012, 19:25:29 schrieb Michael Hampicke: nice idea - but that didn't help in the past. Why should it help now? The question is - why does disk IO make the mouse jerky and delays keyboard input? That is just idiotic. It was just an idea, but maybe there's something wrong on the hardware side? Broken cable, hard drive about to die? no, and this problem has been there since Suse 6.2 and kernel 2.2 Have to checked the SMART data of your hard drive lately (error log, relocate sector count). You can also run some tests with smartctl. of course Or monitor your IO with dstat or iotop. iotop tells you which app causes high io load. cp of course Or maybe you kernel is using some generic and slow driver for your ata controller instead of an optimized one? seriously... Personally I never had IO problems on linux unless theres was something wrong with either the hardware or the kernel driver. good for you Hope that helps. no -- #163933
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 5:41 AM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Some while ago, I wrote: [ mplayer stutters when I/O is going on, even hangs for seconds when I do a dd if=/dev/zero of=somefile bs=1M ] Urs Schutz writes: Just an idea: Is the disk OK? Replace /dev/sda with your disk... [...] I had a bad disk here, which resulted in slow IO, but not complete failure. Smart detected this immediately. Sorry, I do not know how to check disks with LVM. Didn't you get errors in yslog then? I also thought about swapping the system drive - I have a larger backup drive, with nearly identical logical volumes on it, where I make backups with rdiffbackup. So even the content is identical, except for an additional rdiff-backup directory containing the increments. So all I have to do is to echange the two volume group names, reboot, and the system will run from the other drive. But I very much doubt this will help, transfer speed looks okay to me, around 100 MB/s with dd. I did it in another way. I created a large file system (LVM) on my 2nd drive, copied /, /usr, /var, /opt and /home over. My whole system is encrypted, but I omitted this, just to make sure this is not the bottleneck. Alas, no change. Another thing I tried was to change the SATA mode in my BIOS from AHCI to whatever the other option is. This did not help either. Now this is really annoying. I watch small clips mostly, and can live with that, and when I want to watch stuff with others, I copy the file to tmpfs, which seems to help a lot. But now I found another solution: NOT USING KDE. When X crashed (trying to make the old Unreal game play), I fired up another window manager, and when I played a video in there, there was no problem at all. So, I have another workaround. But does anyone have an idea, why running KDE is the problem? Disabling desktop effects does not help. I must be totally crazy because I still want to use KDE, despite the big trouble it gives me nearly every day. Yes, most things work fine now, but there are many many little problems, daily application crashes, and every time I log in I fear that the desktop won't come up. 8G of RAM was not enough to avoid swapping, so now I have 16G, that's fine, I no longer care about kwin using 1G of my RAM. Oh, and I no longer use KMail, after it ate thousands of mails I just wanted to move. No problem, they were not important, but I no longer trust the KDEPIM suite. And it seems the developers do not care about this, the bug report got no replies. But anyway. Any idea why it only happens with KDE? I will ask on the KDE mailing list, but I thought I post here first, maybe there's something Gentoo-specific going on here. Wonko Hey Wonko, OK, fire up two terminals. In one run top, hit 1 z so you see all your CPUs and then watch CPU usage. In the second terminal su to root and run iotop -o. Now, watch for a few minutes and get a feel for what's going on when video is not running. Then start your video and watch IO usage and CPU usage. Where's the problem? Once you get an idea where the bottleneck is we can address what a solution might be. In general, if the CPUs aren't maxed out and it's an I/O problem then usually a bit more buffering is a simple solution. Other more draconian solution might be a real-time kernel with a player (if there is one) that is set up for real-time playback. Looking forward to hearing your test results. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Michael Hampicke writes: Am 07.05.2012 18:26, schrieb Volker Armin Hemmann: Am Montag, 7. Mai 2012, 14:41:34 schrieb Alex Schuster: Some while ago, I wrote: [ mplayer stutters when I/O is going on, even hangs for seconds when I do a dd if=/dev/zero of=somefile bs=1M ] [...] But now I found another solution: NOT USING KDE. When X crashed (trying to make the old Unreal game play), I fired up another window manager, and when I played a video in there, there was no problem at all. So, I have another workaround. But does anyone have an idea, why running KDE is the problem? Disabling desktop effects does not help. nepomuk/virtuoso running in the background whenever you have more than 1 process doing IO linux sucks ass. Now, you write to a partition, nepomuk tries to index it (1 read) and your player reading the video file (2nd read). Interactivity is shot. Pause/kill nepomuk and look if it helps. Nice shot, but this cannot be the problem. Sorry, now that I read my post again I see I did not mention that I _still_ have KDE running all the time, doing whatever it does. I only need to play the videos outside in a window manager I have running in parallel. And the output of my dd action goes to another partition anyway, which is not being indexed. I have 280,000 files indexed, a plain locate gives nearly ten times as much. Virtuoso has been a big pain in the past indeed. So I had it disabled until KDE 4.8 I think. It does some indexing now when I log in, and it is still doing so 8 hours after I logged in the last time, but I do not notice this much, since KDE 4.8. Whether it affects my video playback I'm not so sure, but I have the playback problems even when it is not running - there's too much stuff going on all the time. For me the worst case is: writing lots of files on a usb device - sucks everywhere, even on a vt. Indeed. But should this affect an mplayer using a huge cache? Does it also suck when you are writing with cp, using ionice -c 3? Maybe changing the kernel io scheduler will help? # /usr/src/linux/Documentation/block/switching-sched.txt # /usr/src/linux/Documentation/block/deadline-iosched.txt # /usr/src/linux/Documentation/block/cfq-iosched.txt Nope. I just tried noop and deadline (cfq is my default) and did not see much of a difference. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Alex Schuster wrote: SNIP Now this is really annoying. I watch small clips mostly, and can live with that, and when I want to watch stuff with others, I copy the file to tmpfs, which seems to help a lot. But now I found another solution: NOT USING KDE. When X crashed (trying to make the old Unreal game play), I fired up another window manager, and when I played a video in there, there was no problem at all. So, I have another workaround. But does anyone have an idea, why running KDE is the problem? Disabling desktop effects does not help. I must be totally crazy because I still want to use KDE, despite the big trouble it gives me nearly every day. Yes, most things work fine now, but there are many many little problems, daily application crashes, and every time I log in I fear that the desktop won't come up. 8G of RAM was not enough to avoid swapping, so now I have 16G, that's fine, I no longer care about kwin using 1G of my RAM. Oh, and I no longer use KMail, after it ate thousands of mails I just wanted to move. No problem, they were not important, but I no longer trust the KDEPIM suite. And it seems the developers do not care about this, the bug report got no replies. But anyway. Any idea why it only happens with KDE? I will ask on the KDE mailing list, but I thought I post here first, maybe there's something Gentoo-specific going on here. Wonko When I first built this rig, I ran into this issue as well. What I did was tell smplayer, in my case, to cache more of the video. I have mine set to cache 6Mbs and it plays fine even on HD videos. This may not help you but if you have not tried it yet, may be worth a shot. It is aggravating when it does this tho. Also, there was a thread a good while back with this issue and their fix was to do a emerge -e world with everything optimized for their CPU and such. May be worth thinking about at least. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Dale writes: When I first built this rig, I ran into this issue as well. What I did was tell smplayer, in my case, to cache more of the video. I have mine set to cache 6Mbs and it plays fine even on HD videos. I have cache = 131072 and cache-min=20.0 in .mplayer/config. That's 128MB, this should be enough. Got this hint by James Broadhead some months ago in this thread. Also, there was a thread a good while back with this issue and their fix was to do a emerge -e world with everything optimized for their CPU and such. May be worth thinking about at least. That was Walter Dnes, also in thos thread. But everything should be quite optimized here, with: CFLAGS=-pipe -march=amdfam10 -O2 \ -floop-interchange -floop-strip-mine -floop-block \ -msse -msse2 -msse3 -msse4a -msse4.1 -msse4.2 -m3dnow \ -mcx16 -msahf -maes -mpclmul -mpopcnt -mabm -mlwp -mavx \ --param l1-cache-size=16 \ --param l1-cache-line-size=64 \ --param l2-cache-size=2048 And I do not have high CPU load when playing movies. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Mark Knecht writes: On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 5:41 AM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Some while ago, I wrote: [ mplayer stutters when I/O is going on, even hangs for seconds when I do a dd if=/dev/zero of=somefile bs=1M ] [...] OK, fire up two terminals. In one run top, hit 1 z so you see all your CPUs and then watch CPU usage. In the second terminal su to root and run iotop -o. Now, watch for a few minutes and get a feel for what's going on when video is not running. Then start your video and watch IO usage and CPU usage. Where's the problem? Once you get an idea where the bottleneck is we can address what a solution might be. In general, if the CPUs aren't maxed out and it's an I/O problem then usually a bit more buffering is a simple solution. Other more draconian solution might be a real-time kernel with a player (if there is one) that is set up for real-time playback. Looking forward to hearing your test results. Thanks for your support, Mark! I did this already, but sometimes I do not notice anything. I guess it's short I/O operations in that case. CPU load is not the problem, and it happens for both high-quality videos and small ones. Currently iotop shows stuff like kjournald, kworker, kdeinit4, akonadiserver, firefox. And lots of virtuoso-t and nepomuk when I enable indexing again, which I just suspended. And mplayer of course, it shows up in about every 2nd redisplay, which happens every second. Well... but when I do the same in the other window manager, it seems I see fewer processes then. Are they mostly suspended when I am on another display? And I should fire up the same stuff (Firefox, Chromium, maybe KDEPIM stuff) in the other WM and see if this makes things worse. But I'll do this tomorrow. Thanks for the inspiration, though, at least I have something more to try now. The interrupts are very small normally, but noticeable, annoying and somewhat embarrassing. When they just happened I only noticed akonadi and kjournald during that time. I can force larger interrupts by doing my dd command. But anyway - my intention is not so much to find out what all these I/O processes are and how to make them calm down, renice them or whatever. Four cores @ 3.6 GHz just should be able to play movies without any interruption. And it _is_ possible, when I start the playback on another window manager, while KDE is still running on the other display. I could just switch to, um, u Gnome maybe... or Xfce4... or something else, but I would not like to do so. Despite by big KDE problems. I hate KDE. But I still want it. I feel mad. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On 7 May 2012, at 21:43, Dale wrote: ... Also, there was a thread a good while back with this issue and their fix was to do a emerge -e world with everything optimized for their CPU and such. May be worth thinking about at least. I understood that issue as significantly different - in that case there was stuttering of demanding video with no other i/o occurring. In this case *any* video, even low-res standard-def video, is pausing when i/o load is applied. The previous case is CPU / GPU video decoding performance issue, I think this one is clearly not. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On 18 February 2012 05:45, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote:
Walter Dnes writes:
On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 04:29:48PM +0100, Alex Schuster wrote
Then my hardware broke, and I got new one...
I had ***EXACTLY THE SAME PROBLEM ON A FRESH INSTALL***. In My case
it was a 4+ year old Dell with onboard Intel GPU that was having
problems playing NHL Gamecenter Live streams at the slowest speed. I
solved the problem and sped up everything by doing...
1) emerge system
2) emerge world
3) rebuild the kernel and reboot
Good idea, Walter! But not in my case. The system had been set up long
ago, and I did an emerge -e @world in the past already.
A fresh install will have the stage 3 binaries built with
lowest-common-denominator x86 or amd64 code (depending if you chose 32
or 64 bit install). This is necessary in order to allow the install
code to run on all CPUs with the target platform. The downside is that
you lose all the optimisations that make Gentoo scream. Rebuilding the
install as described above builds optimized (i.e. faster) binaries. My
CFLAGS line in /etc/make.conf is...
CFLAGS=-O2 -march=native -mfpmath=sse -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe
CXXFLAGS=${CFLAGS}
I had those, when I upgraded the hardware:
CFLAGS=-march=k8-sse3 -mfpmath=sse -O2 -pipe
Or something very silimar.
But I also just did an emerge -e @world on the new system, using more
sophisticated CFLAGS. I got them by doing like suggested on [*], using
what -march=natve would do. And adding support for this graphite
stuff. They are:
CFLAGS=-pipe -march=amdfam10 -O2 \
-floop-interchange -floop-strip-mine -floop-block \
-msse -msse2 -msse3 -msse4 -msse4.1 -msse4.2 -m3dnow \
-mcx16 -msahf -maes -mpclmul -mpopcnt -mabm -mlwp -mavx \
--param l1-cache-size=16 --param l1-cache-line-size=64 \
--param l2-cache-size=2048
Before rebuilding your system, go over your USE flags to make sure
you've got the maximum optimization. To find out what your CPU
supports, execute the command
grep flags /proc/cpuinfo | head -1
This will define the limits what your system can support. For
instance, mplayer can use the following flags...
waltdnes@d530 ~ $ emerge -pv mplayer
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild R ] media-video/mplayer-1.0_rc4_p20110322-r1 USE=X a52
alsa ass dga encode gif jpeg mmx mmxext mng mp3 opengl png quicktime
real rtmp sse sse2 ssse3 theora truetype win32codecs x264 xv xvid xvmc
-3dnow -3dnowext -aalib (-altivec) -amr (-aqua) -bidi -bindist -bl
-bluray -bs2b -cddb -cdio -cdparanoia -cpudetection -custom-cpuopts
-debug -dirac -directfb -doc -dts -dv -dvb -dvd -dvdnav (-dxr3) -enca
(-esd) -faac -faad -fbcon -ftp -ggi -gsm -iconv -ipv6 -jack -joystick
-jpeg2k -ladspa -libcaca -libmpeg2 -lirc -live -lzo -mad -md5sum
-mpg123 -nas -network -nut -openal -osdmenu -oss -pnm -pulseaudio -pvr
-radio -rar -rtc -samba -schroedinger -sdl -shm -speex -tga -toolame
-tremor -twolame -unicode -v4l -vdpau -vidix -vorbis -vpx -xanim
-xinerama -xscreensaver -zoran VIDEO_CARDS=-mga -s3virge -tdfx -vesa
0 kB
Your CPU will obviously support a different set of USE flags than
mine. Check the files /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc for a list of
global flags and /usr/portage/profiles/use.local.desc for
package-specific flags.
These are my USE flags for mplayer, they should be fine:
[ebuild R ] media-video/mplayer-1.0_rc4_p20120213 USE=3dnow
3dnowext X a52 aalib alsa ass cdio dga directfb dts dv dvb dvd dvdnav
enca encode faad fbcon ftp ggi gif iconv ipv6 jack jpeg jpeg2k live mad
mmx mmxext mng mp3 nas network openal opengl osdmenu oss png pnm
quicktime rar real rtc samba sdl shm speex sse sse2 ssse3 theora toolame
tremor truetype twolame unicode vorbis x264 xinerama xscreensaver xv xvid
(-altivec) (-aqua) -bidi -bindist -bl -bluray -bs2b -cddb -cdparanoia
-cpudetection -debug -doc (-dxr3) (-esd) -faac -gsm -joystick -ladspa
-libcaca -libmpeg2 -lirc -lzo -md5sum -nut -pulseaudio -pvr -radio -rtmp
-tga -v4l -vdpau (-vidix) (-win32codecs) -xanim -xvmc -zoran
VIDEO_CARDS=-mga -s3virge -tdfx 0 kB
Now I'm bulding a new kernel, using genkernel, and without providing a
custom made .config. Just in case I have some weird setting somewhere
(debug output for SCSI stuff or something like that).
[later...]
So I did. Argh. I thought genkernel was smart enough to generate a
working kernel from scratch, if no existing .config would be given. But
the initramfs could not open my encrypted root partition, until I compiled
XTS and AES directly into the kernel, not only as modules. Genkernel did
not include modules for my NIC, somewhat annoying because I had to wait
several minutes for mysql to start, until I could open a root shell. KDM
was already running at that time, but I only saw a blank screen, because
the radeon stuff was not compiled with KMS. There's also something
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
James Broadhead writes: Please try: ~/.mplayer/config lavdopts=threads=2 # Use 128MiB input cache by default. cache = 131072 # Prefill 20% of the cache before starting playback. cache-min = 20.0 Which should eliminate disk IO somewhat James, thanks for your input. I already had threads = 2 in my config, now I notice that this syntax is not valid. My cache setting was only 10M, and I did not know about cache-min. First, I thought these settings would help, the video I tested this with this night no longer had problems. I commented the settings one after another in order to find out which settings exactly helped most, and even without them, it played fine. Maybe the whole video was in the cache at that time already. Then I tried another video, again with the settings you suggested, and it stuttered. There were small pauses when the system did some stuff, and when I did my dd test, the pauses were as long as five seconds. FIVE SECONDS! Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On Sat, 18 Feb 2012 18:04:07 +0100 Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: ... Then I tried another video, again with the settings you suggested, and it stuttered. There were small pauses when the system did some stuff, and when I did my dd test, the pauses were as long as five seconds. FIVE SECONDS! Wonko Just an idea: Is the disk OK? Replace /dev/sda with your disk... smartctl -t short /dev/sda and after some minutes smartctl --all /dev/sda If all went OK then the status is «PASSED», and you could try the extended or long tests with smartctl. I had a bad disk here, which resulted in slow IO, but not complete failure. Smart detected this immediately. Sorry, I do not know how to check disks with LVM. Urs
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Urs Schutz writes: Just an idea: Is the disk OK? Replace /dev/sda with your disk... smartctl -t short /dev/sda and after some minutes smartctl --all /dev/sda If all went OK then the status is «PASSED», and you could try the extended or long tests with smartctl. I have smartd running. A short self test is done every day, and a long test once per week. I had a bad disk here, which resulted in slow IO, but not complete failure. Smart detected this immediately. Sorry, I do not know how to check disks with LVM. Didn't you get errors in yslog then? I also thought about swapping the system drive - I have a larger backup drive, with nearly identical logical volumes on it, where I make backups with rdiffbackup. So even the content is identical, except for an additional rdiff-backup directory containing the increments. So all I have to do is to echange the two volume group names, reboot, and the system will run from the other drive. But I very much doubt this will help, transfer speed looks okay to me, around 100 MB/s with dd. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 04:29:48PM +0100, Alex Schuster wrote
Then my hardware broke, and I got new one...
I had ***EXACTLY THE SAME PROBLEM ON A FRESH INSTALL***. In My case
it was a 4+ year old Dell with onboard Intel GPU that was having
problems playing NHL Gamecenter Live streams at the slowest speed. I
solved the problem and sped up everything by doing...
1) emerge system
2) emerge world
3) rebuild the kernel and reboot
A fresh install will have the stage 3 binaries built with
lowest-common-denominator x86 or amd64 code (depending if you chose 32
or 64 bit install). This is necessary in order to allow the install
code to run on all CPUs with the target platform. The downside is that
you lose all the optimisations that make Gentoo scream. Rebuilding the
install as described above builds optimized (i.e. faster) binaries. My
CFLAGS line in /etc/make.conf is...
CFLAGS=-O2 -march=native -mfpmath=sse -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe
CXXFLAGS=${CFLAGS}
Before rebuilding your system, go over your USE flags to make sure
you've got the maximum optimization. To find out what your CPU
supports, execute the command
grep flags /proc/cpuinfo | head -1
This will define the limits what your system can support. For
instance, mplayer can use the following flags...
waltdnes@d530 ~ $ emerge -pv mplayer
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild R] media-video/mplayer-1.0_rc4_p20110322-r1 USE=X a52 alsa ass
dga encode gif jpeg mmx mmxext mng mp3 opengl png quicktime real rtmp sse sse2
ssse3 theora truetype win32codecs x264 xv xvid xvmc -3dnow -3dnowext -aalib
(-altivec) -amr (-aqua) -bidi -bindist -bl -bluray -bs2b -cddb -cdio
-cdparanoia -cpudetection -custom-cpuopts -debug -dirac -directfb -doc -dts -dv
-dvb -dvd -dvdnav (-dxr3) -enca (-esd) -faac -faad -fbcon -ftp -ggi -gsm -iconv
-ipv6 -jack -joystick -jpeg2k -ladspa -libcaca -libmpeg2 -lirc -live -lzo -mad
-md5sum -mpg123 -nas -network -nut -openal -osdmenu -oss -pnm -pulseaudio -pvr
-radio -rar -rtc -samba -schroedinger -sdl -shm -speex -tga -toolame -tremor
-twolame -unicode -v4l -vdpau -vidix -vorbis -vpx -xanim -xinerama
-xscreensaver -zoran VIDEO_CARDS=-mga -s3virge -tdfx -vesa 0 kB
Your CPU will obviously support a different set of USE flags than
mine. Check the files /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc for a list of
global flags and /usr/portage/profiles/use.local.desc for
package-specific flags.
--
Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Paul Hartman writes: I wonder if you copy the movie to /dev/shm first (so disk I/O is not an issue) does it still have problems? At least this can potentially eliminate disk I/O as the cause if something else weird is going on. :) Yes, this helps. As does copying the movie to another partition than that on which I to the I/O with my dd if=/dev/zero of= command. If I dd to this partition, tough, it happens again. For the problem of massive amounts of RAM consumed, that's strange. It's been so for years... but with 16 G of RAM it's no longer an issue. Well, unless this weird problem happened wth parallel emerges on tmpfs. It doesn't happen every time though. Are you compiling debug symbols? That can make the RAM usage (in linking especially) explode... No. I sometimes enable it, but only when I hunt a bug and want to produce better bug reports. And even if the emerge would need very much memory, shouldn't this be taken from the 8 G of caches being used, instead of starting to swap? Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Walter Dnes writes:
On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 04:29:48PM +0100, Alex Schuster wrote
Then my hardware broke, and I got new one...
I had ***EXACTLY THE SAME PROBLEM ON A FRESH INSTALL***. In My case
it was a 4+ year old Dell with onboard Intel GPU that was having
problems playing NHL Gamecenter Live streams at the slowest speed. I
solved the problem and sped up everything by doing...
1) emerge system
2) emerge world
3) rebuild the kernel and reboot
Good idea, Walter! But not in my case. The system had been set up long
ago, and I did an emerge -e @world in the past already.
A fresh install will have the stage 3 binaries built with
lowest-common-denominator x86 or amd64 code (depending if you chose 32
or 64 bit install). This is necessary in order to allow the install
code to run on all CPUs with the target platform. The downside is that
you lose all the optimisations that make Gentoo scream. Rebuilding the
install as described above builds optimized (i.e. faster) binaries. My
CFLAGS line in /etc/make.conf is...
CFLAGS=-O2 -march=native -mfpmath=sse -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe
CXXFLAGS=${CFLAGS}
I had those, when I upgraded the hardware:
CFLAGS=-march=k8-sse3 -mfpmath=sse -O2 -pipe
Or something very silimar.
But I also just did an emerge -e @world on the new system, using more
sophisticated CFLAGS. I got them by doing like suggested on [*], using
what -march=natve would do. And adding support for this graphite
stuff. They are:
CFLAGS=-pipe -march=amdfam10 -O2 \
-floop-interchange -floop-strip-mine -floop-block \
-msse -msse2 -msse3 -msse4 -msse4.1 -msse4.2 -m3dnow \
-mcx16 -msahf -maes -mpclmul -mpopcnt -mabm -mlwp -mavx \
--param l1-cache-size=16 --param l1-cache-line-size=64 \
--param l2-cache-size=2048
Before rebuilding your system, go over your USE flags to make sure
you've got the maximum optimization. To find out what your CPU
supports, execute the command
grep flags /proc/cpuinfo | head -1
This will define the limits what your system can support. For
instance, mplayer can use the following flags...
waltdnes@d530 ~ $ emerge -pv mplayer
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild R] media-video/mplayer-1.0_rc4_p20110322-r1 USE=X a52
alsa ass dga encode gif jpeg mmx mmxext mng mp3 opengl png quicktime
real rtmp sse sse2 ssse3 theora truetype win32codecs x264 xv xvid xvmc
-3dnow -3dnowext -aalib (-altivec) -amr (-aqua) -bidi -bindist -bl
-bluray -bs2b -cddb -cdio -cdparanoia -cpudetection -custom-cpuopts
-debug -dirac -directfb -doc -dts -dv -dvb -dvd -dvdnav (-dxr3) -enca
(-esd) -faac -faad -fbcon -ftp -ggi -gsm -iconv -ipv6 -jack -joystick
-jpeg2k -ladspa -libcaca -libmpeg2 -lirc -live -lzo -mad -md5sum
-mpg123 -nas -network -nut -openal -osdmenu -oss -pnm -pulseaudio -pvr
-radio -rar -rtc -samba -schroedinger -sdl -shm -speex -tga -toolame
-tremor -twolame -unicode -v4l -vdpau -vidix -vorbis -vpx -xanim
-xinerama -xscreensaver -zoran VIDEO_CARDS=-mga -s3virge -tdfx -vesa
0 kB
Your CPU will obviously support a different set of USE flags than
mine. Check the files /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc for a list of
global flags and /usr/portage/profiles/use.local.desc for
package-specific flags.
These are my USE flags for mplayer, they should be fine:
[ebuild R] media-video/mplayer-1.0_rc4_p20120213 USE=3dnow
3dnowext X a52 aalib alsa ass cdio dga directfb dts dv dvb dvd dvdnav
enca encode faad fbcon ftp ggi gif iconv ipv6 jack jpeg jpeg2k live mad
mmx mmxext mng mp3 nas network openal opengl osdmenu oss png pnm
quicktime rar real rtc samba sdl shm speex sse sse2 ssse3 theora toolame
tremor truetype twolame unicode vorbis x264 xinerama xscreensaver xv xvid
(-altivec) (-aqua) -bidi -bindist -bl -bluray -bs2b -cddb -cdparanoia
-cpudetection -debug -doc (-dxr3) (-esd) -faac -gsm -joystick -ladspa
-libcaca -libmpeg2 -lirc -lzo -md5sum -nut -pulseaudio -pvr -radio -rtmp
-tga -v4l -vdpau (-vidix) (-win32codecs) -xanim -xvmc -zoran
VIDEO_CARDS=-mga -s3virge -tdfx 0 kB
Now I'm bulding a new kernel, using genkernel, and without providing a
custom made .config. Just in case I have some weird setting somewhere
(debug output for SCSI stuff or something like that).
[later...]
So I did. Argh. I thought genkernel was smart enough to generate a
working kernel from scratch, if no existing .config would be given. But
the initramfs could not open my encrypted root partition, until I compiled
XTS and AES directly into the kernel, not only as modules. Genkernel did
not include modules for my NIC, somewhat annoying because I had to wait
several minutes for mysql to start, until I could open a root shell. KDM
was already running at that time, but I only saw a blank screen, because
the radeon stuff was not compiled with KMS. There's also something
wrong with my hardware clock. And iotop does not work, the kernel is
missing CONFIG_TASKSTATS,
[gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Hi there! Strange things are going on here. I've written here in the past about my performance problems. My dual-core had trouble playing movies without stuttering when there was I/O. It was mainly swapping that caused this, and 8 G were not enough for me running KDE4. Then my hardware broke, and I got new one, except for the system hard drive and the PSU. It's an AMD FX-4100 quad-core with 3.6 GHz, 16 G of RAM. Running gentoo-sources-3.2.1 as kernel. But it seems playing movies got even worse! The videos do not need to have high quality. When I do this, I get interruptions, sometimes for more than a whole second: # dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/argh bs=10M count=1000 My whole system is encrypted, but the same happens with unencrypted partitions. All are on LVM. When I write to another drive, there is no effect. Throughput is around 50-60 MB/s. Any ideas where to look? I think I'll create a completely fresh kernel .config with genkernel, maybe my own .config has some weird problem. But I tried similar things in the past already, getting a kernel from a live cd, to no effect. I put cache = 10240 into .mplayer/config to get 10 MB of video cached, but I see no effect. Playing music with Amarok is no problem. My SATA drives are in AHCI mode, here's some dmesg info about that: ahci :00:11.0: version 3.0 ahci :00:11.0: PCI INT A - GSI 22 (level, low) - IRQ 22 ahci :00:11.0: AHCI 0001.0100 32 slots 4 ports 3 Gbps 0xf impl SATA mode ahci :00:11.0: flags: 64bit ncq sntf ilck led clo pmp pio slum part ccc sxs scsi0 : ahci scsi1 : ahci scsi2 : ahci scsi3 : ahci ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m1024@0xff70b000 port 0xff70b100 irq 22 ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m1024@0xff70b000 port 0xff70b180 irq 22 ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m1024@0xff70b000 port 0xff70b200 irq 22 ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m1024@0xff70b000 port 0xff70b280 irq 22 ahci :02:00.0: PCI INT A - GSI 19 (level, low) - IRQ 19 ahci :02:00.0: irq 43 for MSI/MSI-X ahci: SSS flag set, parallel bus scan disabled ahci :02:00.0: AHCI 0001.0200 32 slots 2 ports 6 Gbps 0x3 impl SATA mode ahci :02:00.0: flags: 64bit ncq sntf stag led clo pmp pio slum part ccc sxs ahci :02:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 scsi4 : ahci scsi5 : ahci ata5: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m512@0xff60 port 0xff600100 irq 43 ata6: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m512@0xff60 port 0xff600180 irq 43 pata_atiixp :00:14.1: PCI INT A - GSI 16 (level, low) - IRQ 16 scsi6 : pata_atiixp scsi7 : pata_atiixp ata7: PATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0x1f0 ctl 0x3f6 bmdma 0xf000 irq 14 ata8: PATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0xf008 irq 15 (ata7/8 is the additional PATA controller, seen with the pata_atiixp driver. I have one drive there, but it is not being used.) When my new girl-friend comes over and we want to watch a movie, and it stutters... she will ask why I don't simply use Windows to get better performance, her five year old PC would do this just fine. Wat do I tell her? WHAT DO I TELL HER?? And then there's what happened yesterday. A world update was going on, with libreoffice, firefox, wine and thunderbird emerging in parallel, all big packages. I have the PORTAGE_TMPDIR on a 5GB tmpfs, only libreoffice is being compiled on disk. Suddenly, my system became very unresponsive, the mouse had disappeared, the KDE widgets did not update, and xosview showed a load of 23. All 4 cores were at 100%, the type of usage was io-wait. How can I find out in such a case which processes are waiting for I/O? top showed nothing. The Ctrl-Esc task viewer of KDE showed some processes being 'inactive on hard drive', does this men those are the waiting tasks? They varied, they were mostly Akonadi stuff. I stopped akonadi, and after a while the load dropped. But this may be a coincidence. After all had calmed down, I had 2G of swap in use. 16G total RAM, all being used of course, but only 8G being needed according to the -/+ buffers/cache line in free -m, the other 8G are cache. Does my Linux somehow prefer to have this much cache, even if tmpfs stuff gets put into swap? I have vm.swappiness = 0 in /etc/sysctl.conf. Is there a command to show me what processes the memory in swap belongs to? Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 7:29 AM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Hi there! Hi back at ya. How can I find out in such a case which processes are waiting for I/O? top showed nothing. iotop is your friend. I'll write more when I get some time to think HTH, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 9:29 AM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: I've written here in the past about my performance problems. My dual-core had trouble playing movies without stuttering when there was I/O. It was mainly swapping that caused this, and 8 G were not enough for me running KDE4. Then my hardware broke, and I got new one, except for the system hard drive and the PSU. It's an AMD FX-4100 quad-core with 3.6 GHz, 16 G of RAM. Running gentoo-sources-3.2.1 as kernel. But it seems playing movies got even worse! You don't mention anything about video card or video driver setup. That's the first thing I would suspect. What video card? What drivers? Are you using hardware accelerated movie playback?
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Paul Hartman writes: On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 9:29 AM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Then my hardware broke, and I got new one, except for the system hard drive and the PSU. It's an AMD FX-4100 quad-core with 3.6 GHz, 16 G of RAM. Running gentoo-sources-3.2.1 as kernel. But it seems playing movies got even worse! You don't mention anything about video card or video driver setup. That's the first thing I would suspect. What video card? What drivers? Are you using hardware accelerated movie playback? Sorry. Radeon HD 4250 onboard graphics, using the open source radeon driver. Hardware acceleration is working fine. As I wrote, it doesn't matter which quality the videos are. There is not much CPU being used at all, around 5% to 20%, so this is not the bottleneck. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 10:49 AM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Paul Hartman writes: On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 9:29 AM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Then my hardware broke, and I got new one, except for the system hard drive and the PSU. It's an AMD FX-4100 quad-core with 3.6 GHz, 16 G of RAM. Running gentoo-sources-3.2.1 as kernel. But it seems playing movies got even worse! You don't mention anything about video card or video driver setup. That's the first thing I would suspect. What video card? What drivers? Are you using hardware accelerated movie playback? Sorry. Radeon HD 4250 onboard graphics, using the open source radeon driver. Hardware acceleration is working fine. As I wrote, it doesn't matter which quality the videos are. There is not much CPU being used at all, around 5% to 20%, so this is not the bottleneck. Wonko I wonder if you copy the movie to /dev/shm first (so disk I/O is not an issue) does it still have problems? At least this can potentially eliminate disk I/O as the cause if something else weird is going on. :) For the problem of massive amounts of RAM consumed, that's strange. Are you compiling debug symbols? That can make the RAM usage (in linking especially) explode...
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Mark Knecht writes: On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 7:29 AM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: How can I find out in such a case which processes are waiting for I/O? top showed nothing. iotop is your friend. I had called it, but didn't spot the problem there. I don't remember exactly what the output was, I had expected to see some process show a large value in the IO column, but that was not the case. I THINK! Various processes appeared, mostly Akonadi stuff. I should have logged this, I don't remember this s well. I have caught some illness, and had fever, which did not help my memory. There were some kworker processes listed on top, but I don't remember whether in iotop or in top. Hmm. Now I just started Akonadi again, and get a lot I/O in iotop, and xosview again shows much iowait CPU activity for a while. But that calmed down after a minute. I'll write more when I get some time to think Thanks :) Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: Mark Knecht writes: On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 7:29 AM, Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org wrote: How can I find out in such a case which processes are waiting for I/O? top showed nothing. iotop is your friend. I had called it, but didn't spot the problem there. I don't remember exactly what the output was, I had expected to see some process show a large value in the IO column, but that was not the case. I THINK! Various processes appeared, mostly Akonadi stuff. I should have logged this, I don't remember this s well. I have caught some illness, and had fever, which did not help my memory. There were some kworker processes listed on top, but I don't remember whether in iotop or in top. Hmm. Now I just started Akonadi again, and get a lot I/O in iotop, and xosview again shows much iowait CPU activity for a while. But that calmed down after a minute. I'll write more when I get some time to think Thanks :) Wonko Sorry. I was rushing then as now. If you start iotop and then hit the 'o' key it will show only processes actually doing io. If you're hang is truly an iowait then my experience is that it should at least identify what process is having the problem. HTH, Mark
