[MPlayer-users] MPlayer's sensitivity to disk activity

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Mon, Dec 02, 2013 at 09:33:29PM +0100, Wiebe Cazemier wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Reimar Döffinger" <Reimar.Doeffinger at gmx.de>
> > To: "MPlayer usage questions, feature requests, bug reports" <mplayer-users at mplayerhq.hu>
> > Sent: Friday, 29 November, 2013 9:56:06 PM
> > Subject: Re: [MPlayer-users] MPlayer's sensitivity to disk activity
> > 
> > On 29.11.2013, at 19:35, Wiebe Cazemier <wiebe at halfgaar.net> wrote:
> > > Over the years, I've also experimented with different cache sizes. I've
> > > tried everything from no cache to hundreds of megabytes. I also tried
> > > experimenting with the cache-min setting. But, the problem persists.
> > 
> > Did you look at the cache fill amount? The last value in the status line, in
> > percent.
> > If it doesn't get anywhere near 0 disk is not the issue.
> > Seems unlikely, but possibly look at interrupt load, crappy network cards can
> > at high bandwidths drown things in an interrupt storm. That should probably
> > apply to normal downloads as well though...
> 
> It's been hard to reproduce the issue consistently, but with µTorrent and dd running, cache size seems to stick around 50%. However, now that I need to become jerky, it's staying annoyingly smooth :)
> 
> BTW, if I remove the cache directive from the config file, there doesn't seem to be any cache. It becomes really jerky, and there is no percentage as last figure in Mplayer's status line.

That is all as expected, without cache competing disk loads can cause
issues.
Though in theory the OS should be reading ahead sufficiently, so it
might be a cause of bad configuration and/or the OS caching code not
being good.