[MPlayer-users] Cache usage in mplayer

[Jorge Gascon Perez]

Hi and congratulations because mplayer is nice!

But there is a thing related with the cache usage, I think that it is
very far from being optimal.

I usually store my movies in a USB disk and I watch a movie using, for example:

        mplayer -cache 8000 my_movie.avi

Watching the information numbers that mplayer puts in the console I
see that the last percentage number starts
in 99% and it goes down to 50%, I think that this number represents
the cache usage.

But, under the 50%, mplayer starts to make a lot of calls to the USB
disk for filling only a 1% of the cache, keeping
the caché between 49% - 51%.  So a lot of reads per second are performed.

Obviously, my USB disk is in danger of burning in fire.


I think that the optimal purpose of a cache is preventing the
excessive access to a slower storage (hard disk).

So I think that the cache should go down from 99% to the 10% and under
this 10% it should refill itself quickly
to the 99% again, minimizing the disk access usage.


Looking at the code I see that in "stream/cache2.c"  I see that a
thread is created and used to refill the cache,
basically, I think that it is the code that the thread performs.

  do {
      if(!cache_fill(s)){
	   usec_sleep(FILL_USLEEP_TIME); // idle
      }
       //	 cache_stats(s->cache_data);
  } while (cache_execute_control(s));


But, How can I change the code to get a better performance of mplayer's cache.

I'm using a Ubuntu Linux 8.04 and the mplayer svn r30137.

Thanks!