Performance?

lasseo · n00b Joined: 25 Mar 2003 Posts: 33

Hi.

I have performance problem and looking for help.

The overall performance for the system feels a little bit to low.

My hardware are:
Duron 750@900 MHz
256 MB SDRAM
GeForce 4 Ti 64 MB
Chaintech Motherboard
Nvidia driver installed with emerge.
X installed with emerge
Kernel compiled with Athlon/Duron option and the VIA82CXX chipset.

A few days ago I installed Mplayer and the KDE GUI. The performance on playing DIVX movies was really bad. The CPU does not reach a very high value but the movie is not view smoothly.

I found some discussions about some performance problem with the linux-2.4.20-gentoo-r1 kernel so I installed linux-2.4.19 instead.

With this kernel everything is running smoother but still I can't view a DIVX perfectly.

Does someone have any clue how I can get this system to perform better. I should be able to play divX movies, right?

Best Regards
Lars Olsson

Liathus · Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2003 9:15 pm Post subject:

I was having a lot of slugishness in kde and some audio/video stuttering when I first started using gentoo on my p4 1.7ghz. I was using the vanilla-2.4.20 sources. I attempted to speed things up by switching to the gentoo-2.4.20-r1 kernel but I found that it ran even slower!

As of now I am running the development-2.5.65 kernel and things are very very fast indeed! I was very reluctant to use the 2.5 kernel (i tried it about 8 months ago and had a lot of stability problems) but I have been plessently suprised. I havn't had any kernel crashed or other unexpected behavior and I have been running the new kernel for about a week.

All of my kde slugishness has gone away and my audio/video apps run as smooth as silk now as well

IMHO if you want optimum performance 2.5.x is the way to go.

shm · Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2003 2:40 am Post subject:

If you don't want to try 2.5.x (2.6 is set to be released around june).., you can try the ck-sources.. it's better for most desktop operations than gentoo sources is.

Also, mess with mplayer options.. make sure you're using Xvideo.

djf_jeff · Apprentice Joined: 17 Feb 2003 Posts: 174 Location: Quebec

I have read that DMA enable hard disk eliminate the lag in divx playback... It work for me.

So check if your DMA is activated on your disk with hdparm

wHAcKer · Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2003 2:14 pm Post subject:

i had a similar problem the first time i installed gentoo, DMA was indeed disabled back then and i enabled it and then it worked smooth as hell

Malakin · Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2003 8:43 pm Post subject:

In addition to making sure dma is working on your hard drive/s, make sure you're using the xv video output in mplayer.

In another thread I was saying how mplayer was running at about 4% cpu utilization, booting into windows it was at 45% using windows media player on the same video, mplayer and xine are both very fast.