From kde-core-devel  Mon Sep 06 17:38:43 1999
From: Stefan Westerfeld <stefan () space ! twc ! de>
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 1999 17:38:43 +0000
To: kde-core-devel
Subject: Re: aRts as KDE2.0 audio server
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=93663884625808

   Hi!

On Mon, Sep 06, 1999 at 05:11:06PM +0200, Martin Vogt wrote:
> I have tested arts-3.3 all I can say is that the performace
> is incredible poor!
> I was not able to play a single mp3 on my P166MMX.
> 
> Here is what I have done:
> 
> start artsbuilder
> get from server "example_mixer_simple"
> execute structure
> start artsmp3
> 
> I had a cpu load of 75% and it clicks all the time.
> Even it is very flexible, it should as well be fast enough
> to play a single mp3.(IMHO)
> 
> I donīt know where the problem is, or if I have done 
> something wrong, but speed _is_ an issue for a multimedia
> framework.

I agree with you fully, here. The problem is, that when you are developing
on a PII-350, you basically don't care about the 20% cpu usage that this
simple mixer structure does.

Ok, but there should be room for quite some optimizations in that. Please try

http://space.twc.de/~stefan/example_mixer_nosat.arts

which is the same structure without saturation filter (that prevents
clipping if you give too loud input signal), and with only three channels.
Copy it to arts/structures in your home directory, so it will be loaded
automagically at startup.

Also, I'd like to know what percentage goes to the mp3 player, artscat and
artsserver.bin. Another thing I'd like to ask you is wether you started
artsserver.bin as root? Unless your overall load (of all processes) exceeds
100%, arts should never ever click. It has realtime priority for that. Of
course mpg123 doesn't have realtime priority and may therefore be hit by
cpu load attacks.

Oh well - and if you can, please do a comparision between

mpg123 -s somefile.mp3 | artscat   + artsserver

and

mpg123 -s somefile.mp3 | esdcat    + esd

   Cu... Stefan
-- 
  -* Stefan Westerfeld, stefan@space.twc.de (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany
     KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *-