On Sun, 2006-11-26 at 15:12 -0800, Randall R Schulz wrote:
There's more to what happens in a computer than CPU usage. I/O matters, too, as do interrupts (the mouse, like all I/O devices, being interrupt-driven).
This is probably it, thanks!
Probably it's I/O load that's slowing your system even when mencoder doesn't need all or even most of the CPU. In fact, I/O limits may be slowing mencoder, too.
I sent another mail to the list just after the first one to address this. I'm sending the video directly to an external firewire disc. The usage on the disc is anyway not too high (I'm encoding on the fly). Even if I write to the notebook's disc, if I don't use nice it runs smoothly and I can still use the notebook. The only reason I use nice is to avoid the odd dropped frame.
I'm not sure it will help, but you might want to familiarize yourself with "ionice." As the name suggests, it's the I/O counterpart to "nice," which addresses only CPU consumption. I'm familiar with ionice - I tried that initially but it didn't make any difference. I supposed the disc usage is not high enough.
How many independent disk drives do you have? Two
What bus do they use (i.e., SCSI, IDE or SATA)? What spindle RPMs do they use? Have you configured optimal DMA for all your high-throughput devices (disks and your video interface hardware, at the least)? Notebook: IDE 5400rpm 8mb cache. DMA is on, but I didn't do anything extra - left it as SUSE configured, and it is performing quite well.
External: IDE 7200rpm 16mb cache, in a firewire enclosure. The KDE automount mounts it with "sync" so I remount it without sync, otherwise it is quite slow. Thanks Hans -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org