More SWAP = Hirgh CPU Performance?

[thelonegunmen]

Ok, my CPU is getting bogged down or something when I play videos or movies on my computer, this is only a Natty problem so far, I thought it was my GPU, but after tinkering with that, I believe that maybe I don't have enough swap memory. What's happening is when I play a movie on my computer, after a while it starts to lag, the sound's gone, and it bogs my computer down to the point of inoperability. This only happens with movies, that I play on my computer, vids from youtube, or any other online source do not give me this problem, streams to a program like VLC do give me this problem. Will increasing the swap help me any, or am I going to have to break in and up the ante on my CPU fan or something?

[Rog132]

Re: More SWAP = Hirgh CPU Performance?

SWAP

Links:
> Swap Partition FAQ:
> All about Linux swap space
> All About Linux Swap Part 1: Introduction:
> All About Linux Swap Part 2: Management
> All About Linux Swap Part 3: Analysis
> Linux: How to Use RAM as Swap

[wizard10000]

Re: More SWAP = Hirgh CPU Performance?

> Linux: How to Use RAM as Swap

This made me grin. Back around 1994 I had a stroke of genius and put a Windows 3.1 swapfile on a ramdisk thinking it'd speed up the PC - made perfect sense to me. The techs who knew a lot more than me back then were very kind and kinda just shook their heads and walked away

It turns out I was just ten years ahead of my time. I feel vindicated

Actually this is a pretty good idea in Windows now if you've got a lot of RAM as some applications require swap but I don't think you can create a ramdisk in an NT-based OS with the utilities that come with Windows.

But - TFA is seven years old and I think Linux memory management is good enough now that moving swap to RAM makes sense only if you don't need the RAM for disk caching, and there are other ways to limit cache size.

It was a heck of an interesting read, though

[Teunis]

Re: More SWAP = Hirgh CPU Performance?

When swap is used for playback of a video there's a more basic problem.
Your application seems to pre process the data faster than it plays it.
Or it keeps the already played data in memory instead of releasing it.

I've had examples of this with certain codex, switching to a different player helped to clear the issue.
Presently I'm happiest with the Smplayer.

[oshunluvr]

Re: More SWAP = Hirgh CPU Performance?

If the computer we're talking about is the one in your sig - you've got more than enough CPU, GPU and RAM to handle a movie playing. In fact, IMO swapping would really slow everything down.

Let's start with some basic trouble shooting: Open ksysguard and leave it visible and then launch a movie. If your RAM usage continually grows, you've got something leaking memory. - could be X or the VLC or the codec or something else.

[thelonegunmen]

Re: More SWAP = Hirgh CPU Performance?

If the computer we're talking about is the one in your sig - you've got more than enough CPU, GPU and RAM to handle a movie playing. In fact, IMO swapping would really slow everything down.

Let's start with some basic trouble shooting: Open ksysguard and leave it visible and then launch a movie. If your RAM usage continually grows, you've got something leaking memory. - could be X or the VLC or the codec or something else.

Thanks oshunluvr, I'll give that a whirl tomorrow.