[CLUE-Tech] Terminal Crash Madness!

[Jed S. Baer]

On Fri, 07 Mar 2003 18:57:04 -0700
mgushee at havenrock.com wrote:

> On 7 Mar 2003 at 17:57, Jed S. Baer wrote:
> 
> > As long as we're talking about strangeness, if I'm running xmms while
> > surfing the web, and I switch tabs in Galeon, the music gets
> > interrupted.
> 
> I'm not sure that's strange. I have similar things happen quite 
> often. A computer sound card doesn't really qualify as professional-
> quality audio equipment, and more to the point, it isn't a stand-
> alone device: it has to share CPU, bus, and other resources with 
> other subsystems. And playing sound is actually one of the most CPU-
> intensive things you can do, so even small demands from other 
> processes will tend to disrupt the sound player.
> 
> Or do you mean that switching tabs, but *not* other seemingly-
> equivalent GUI events, interrupt the sound? In that case maybe it is 
> a little strange. I wonder if somehow tab-switching is an 
> unexpectedly expensive operation?

Well, except that with the same hardware, it was always just fine, under
the pre-RH8.0 combination of kernel/Xfree/etc. stuff. In fact, the same
sort of thing happened quite a bit back when I was running a 2.2 kernel,
and stopped when I got to the 2.4.7 kernel, and now that I'm up to 2.4.18
(I think), it's happening again. But it might have nothing to do with the
kernel, and everything to do with the latest release of the xmms-mpg3
library. I dunno. Another reason to avoid the mass update process of
installing a whole new release. Too many things change, so it's harder to
pin any problems down.

I dunno how expensive tab-switching is in Galeon. I haven't noticed that
it differs with the page content displayed on each tab. I don't know the
degree to which changing the "video out" for the widget taxes the CPU or
the bus.

jed
-- 
I wouldn't even think about bribing a rottweiler with a steak that
didn't weigh more than I do. -- Jason Earl