[MPlayer-users] mplayer + heavy io: why ionice doesn't help?

[The Wanderer]

Denis Vlasenko wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I noticed that mplayer's video playback starts to skip if I do some
> serious copying or grepping on the disk with movie being played from.
> 
> nice helps, but does not eliminate the problem. I guessed that this
> is a problem with mplayer failing to read next portion of input data
> in time, so I used Jens's ionice.c from 
> Documentation/block/ioprio.txt

(Where is this path located? It certainly isn't part of the MPlayer
source tree.)

> I am using it this:
> 
> ionice -c1 -n0 -p<mplayer pid>
> 
> but so far I don't see any effect from using it. mplayer still skips.
> 
> Does anybody have an experience in this?

I've never heard of ionice (so, no), but in similar circumstance (say,
trying to watch a video during the daily 06:00-ish updatedb run, which
runs 'find' on virtually my entire set of hard disks) I just use '-cache
8192' - admittedly with not overly high-resolution videos, but I've
rarely had much problem with the kind of skipping you describe when
using that option.

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.