[MPlayer-users] How to pause mencoder
Adam Nielsen
a.nielsen at optushome.com.au
Thu Dec 25 16:30:55 CET 2003
> It's not a problem with process scheduling, that's done rather well
> (at least in 2.4, dont know about 2.6), but the problem is the
> PC architecture which has a poor I/O system that blocks everything
> and Linux which has problem handling big I/O loads.
Well, at the risk of starting a flamewar, Windows never used to make my mouse
cursor go jerky while it was heavily accessing the disk... (and yes, I've got
DMA enabled.) So it's definitely a Linux issue. I tried installing the
preemptive kernel patch a while ago though, and that made a big improvement
which is why I think it's a multitasking issue. If the kernel is stuck in a
long I/O operation as you say and has blocked, then no other processes can
run (which is presumably why the performance is even worse when playing over
a network, even when the network is nowhere near its bandwidth limits and
mplayer has a huge -cache.)
And yes, I do agree that process scheduling is done well in Linux, but it
would still be nice to have an "idle" priority like in win32 - then you can
run a program in the background and it will give up *all* its CPU cycles
should the need arise (as opposed to nice -19 which only gives up most of the
CPU cycles.) It sure beats manually suspending distributed.net/SETI/etc. to
speed up mencoder ;-)
Cheers,
Adam.
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