[NTLUG:Discuss] inconsistent sound

[Kevin Brannen]

Bryan J. Smith wrote:

>On Tue, 2004-10-26 at 22:20, Kevin Brannen wrote:
>  
>
>>If I didn't know better, I'd say it was bogged down by some other 
>>process like updatedb, but it ain't so.  I'll run it with xosview up so 
>>I can see instantaneous changes, and the CPU is barely being used, and 
>>the disk is only being used in minimal amounts.  It's a single AMD 
>>2.4Ghz Athlon with an AC97 chip on an MSI MB w/ 1G of RAM, running Suse 
>>9.0; so I'm having trouble imagining this isn't a powerful enough 
>>system.
>>    
>>
>
>Power isn't I/O.  If you've got something taxing the PCI bus -- which is
>only a measly 0.125GBps (32-bit @ 33MHz) _ideal_, then that could be an
>issue.  I've had the same issue under Windows and Linux, if something
>bursts through the PCI bus, the sound may get squeaky.
>  
>

Good point on power -v- I/O.  Nevertheless, I can watch xosview and see 
virtually no CPU, memory paging, or disk usage.  When this happens, I'm 
usually not even using the computer for anything but xmms (because I'm 
writing checks or some other none computer task), I'm just using it as a 
very expensive MP3 player. :-)

FWIW, as the machine is dual boot, I've never noticed this problem under 
ms-win2k.  I don't listen to music under that very often, but I have 
done it without any problems at all.  This almost makes me think it's a 
scheduling issue with the 2.4 kernel, but it doesn't happen all the 
time, just sporatically.

>It could also be a sound server issue.
>  
>

Yeh, that definitely could be.  I've seen other artsd problems 
(generally contention); I'm not a fan of it at all.

> ...
>
>>of course it had a SBLive! in it.  I'm wondering if the builtin AC97 is the 
>>problem, but that seems strange.
>>    
>>
>
>It doesn't at all.  It all depends on how much host processing you put
>on your system CPU and memory, which then hogs up the I/O.  Cheap audio
>puts more on the CPU, where the audio chip itself is little more than a
>DAC.
>  
>

I'm thinking that SBLive! card is about to come back to dad and the kids 
will get one of my older SB cards as it's in their machine now. :-)

>Same issue with software RAID-5, it's not the XORs, it's the taxing of
>the I/O bus in sending in all data to the CPU and memory for the XORs to
>be calculated.  That's why an XOR engine on-card is better, because it
>doesn't send the data over the PCI bus.
>  
>

I see your point, but from the Slashdot article I just finished reading, 
a lot of people would disagree with you. :-)  [Note I'm not trying to 
revive that past thread, I just thought the timing between this comment 
and the Slashdot article was amusing.]

 > ...

Anyway, thanks to everyone for their comments!  Given the above and 
Ralph's experience, I think the SBLive! card will be changing systems 
and coming back home to me.

Kevin