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On Sun, 2008-02-24 at 17:45 +0200, Uwe Thiem wrote: |
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> On Sunday 24 February 2008, Florian Philipp wrote: |
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> > Hi! |
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> > |
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> > I noticed a very annoying behavior. I've got a headless server |
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> > (Athlon 64 X2) which primarily acts as a personal video recorder |
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> > using mencoder and at-daemon. In its idle-time it's supposed to run |
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> > a dnet-client. |
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> > |
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> > Then I've got a laptop (64bit Celeron, single core) on which I play |
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> > those video files from my server over NFS. |
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> > |
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> > So far, so good. My problem is: Neither of them can handle |
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> > recording/playing video while there is any background activity. |
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> > That means I have to stop the dnet-daemon and suspend any emerges |
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> > on my laptop. If I don't, both mencoder and mplayer loose sync of |
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> > audio and video and drops frames. |
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> |
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> By dnet-daemon you mean dnetc, right? If you run dnetc with nice 19 |
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> and simultaneously something that uses as much CPU as it can get |
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> (like a fractals generator) at nice 0, you will see that dnetc still |
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> uses around 6% CPU. But it does go down to 6%. The remaining CPU |
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> should be enough for watching video. Disclaimer: I have never used |
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> mplayer on a 64bit system. It might have issues there. |
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> |
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> Since you are playing the video over NFS you do so over the network. |
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> Maybe a stupid question: You do use FastEthernet without any hub, |
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> right? Switches are alright but hubs are evil. |
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> |
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> A possiible work around might be to increase the buffer in mplayer to |
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> something around 1MB. |
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> |
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> Uwe |
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Yep, I meant dnetc (I thought dnet-client would be better |
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understandable). And yes, it does go down but not far enough, especially |
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because there are two such processes (one for each core). By the way: |
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Another daemon who's causing problems is clrngd, creating 100% |
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CPU-utilization every 4 minutes for about 1 minute. |
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I neither use a switch nor a hub, just a good old crossover cable. |
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In fact, I used to let mplayer create a 8MB cache but without background |
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activity it was useless and with it, it's got eaten up too soon. |
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Mencoder seems to utilize a queue/fifo/whatever-you-might-call-it by |
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default but that doesn't help if it doesn't reach 25fps. |
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Since nobody seems to have an idea, maybe someone can tell me how I |
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allow processes with real-time priority (nice -n -20) to be started by |
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an ordinary user? Of course I'm aware of sudo but I don't want a simple |
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media encoder to have super-user permissions. |
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