Re: Bad desktop performance, I think (was: Re: [gentoo-performance] Hello? Thump-thump?)

[Mansour Moufid]

Hello all,

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 6:07 AM, Alex Schuster <wonko@×××××××××.org> wrote:
> I am a little disappointed by the performance of my system. mplayer
> sometimes stutters a little during the calculation phase of emerge -DpN
> @world, swfdec-player does so even more. Well, sometimes even without
> emerges, I guess this flash player is not coded so well.
>
> My system is not the fastest, silence and low power consumption was more
> important for me. Still, it should be fast enough I think. I have an AMD
> Athlon(tm) Dual Core Processor 4850e CPU (using -march), 4GB of memory, an
> 1.5 TB drive. The whole system is encrypted (aes-xts-plain) and LVMed.
> While the LVM overhead should be small, encryption of course creates some
> extra load. /var/tmp/portage is an unencrypted tmpfs volume though. kernel
> is 2.6.31-tuxonice. I'm running KDE4 with desktop effects enabled (running
> ati-drivers), X itself takes about 30-40% of CPU time according to top.
> mplayer itself needs less than 20%.

I also use LVM encryption, and mplayer plays 720p at 30 fps just fine
with only the integrated Intel graphics and 1 GB of RAM. So, I suspect
you are just not using the full potential of your CPU.

If you haven't already: grep flags /proc/cpuinfo; add any of the
{mmx,mmext,sse,sse2,ssse3,3dnow,3dnowext} flags there along with
"custom-cpuopts" to your mplayer line in /etc/portage/package.use;
then re-emerge of course.

With 4GB if RAM you should probably also set swappiness to a lower
value than default.

That's all I can think of for now, good luck!

-- 
Mansour Moufid