Re: [gentoo-user] aRts sound server on KDE 3.5.2?

[Glenn Enright]

On Thursday 20 April 2006 8:12 am, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
I got this all the time with ac97 chipset with older versions of arts. Maybee 
you are running a similar chipset? or an old driver or something? what kernel 
version do you run?

From google with search on 'arts cpu overload'
http://www.arts-project.org/doc/handbook/faq.html#id2805932
>
>13.3 What is wrong in the driver if I get the cpu overload problem?
>
>Usually, artsd uses select() to find out when to write new data. Then, it
>uses an ioctl(...GETOSPACE...) to find out how much data to write. Finally,
>it writes this data.
>
>A problem occurs if artsd is woken up either always or if there are minimal
>amounts of data to write. The OSS documentation specifies that select() only
>wakes up a process if there is at least one fragment to write. However, if
>artsd is woken up if there isn't data to write, or very little, for instance
>one sample, then it will keep writing little pieces of audio data, which can
>be very costly, and eventually overload the cpu.
>
>To fix this, the driver should wake up artsd only if there is a full fragment
>to write.
>

That page is a little old but it sould give you an idea of where to start.
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