Alan McKinnon wrote:
On Tuesday 19 August 2008 15:30:07 Dale wrote:
Håkon Alstadheim wrote:
<< SNIP >>
I'm running the machine for multi-media-use, and I would like to make
sure that I tune the media-programs to leave sufficcient cpu to handle
the odd house-keeping task, while at the same time doing as much
post-processing for image and sound quality as possible. Is there a
way to get top to make sense, or are there other tools you good people
would recommend ?
The only thing I can think of that may help is to use the nice command
to give some processes more or less priority. That may or may not help
you any but it is a thought.
Otherwise, I tend to agree with Alan. Leave it to the kernel.
I thought of one thing that might help - perhaps the media apps in question
are single threaded and might benefit from a different preemption model
algorithm. Give the old-fashioned server model a try instead of desktop or
low-latency desktop. It's worth a try, YMMV
When I say "tune" I mean things like picking a resolution and a
deinterlace method for video that is as good as possible, while still
leaving enough headroom to avoid uneven playback. Given that a schedule
update or a backup run might kick in at a bad time despite all efforts
to write a good crontab, knowing when to stop is not always easy. I run
all system tasks under "nice ionice -c3", and they will still cause
hiccups if the system is maxed out. Looks like the good old trial and
error is the only method that will work. Being on the bleeding edge,
that means erring on the side of caution, or else you never know whether
you have hit a system bottleneck or a bug in the software .... :-) .
mplayer kept saying my system was too slow, while the cpu was idling at
20%. Turns out top was correct in that instance, mplayer was
misinterpreting input data, trying to play back at half the intended
frame-rate. Now I'm past that hurdle and adding deinterlacing and other
filters. I'll just have to hold back on the temptation to go all out on
the filter options :-)
Thanks for keeping me from wasting any more time with top though.
