very choppy sound on heavy disc access

[sledgehammer89]

Does have a *very* (every 3-5 sec) stuttering and choppy or no sound output for seconds when creating a DVD iso file (=heavy disc access)

Players tested: rhythmbox, beep-media-player (playing a mp3 file)
command for creating iso-file: mkisofs -dvd-video -o videodvd.iso ./DVD
orig hdparm: 16, dma on
also tested with hdparm: 32bit, dma on

system: dapper (gnome) with updates to now

should be: 98% (most of the time) smooth sound (maybe 1 or 2 choppy sequences)

tested against: Slackware-current (2.6.15, xorg6.9, kde3.5) on same PC/harddisc (other partition) with 32bit, dma on. Same situation with beep-media-player playing mp3 and creating the same iso file

Sorry, doesn't know what package is wrong, maybe the kernel?

my hardware: p4 2.4ghz 1gb ram 160gb samsung (8mb cache) nvidia 6600gt sblive

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Bus overload. There are limits and unless a particular program is going to do buffering then there are going to be sound dropouts when the bus is completely saturated.

If Ubuntu is saturating the bus more than Slackware (e.g. it has found drivers / settings that let your hard disks transfer data faster, your video card is now using binary drivers and is also transfering more data etc.) then your only way out is for sound playing software to do more buffering so that it can go longer before an under run occurs.

sblives are notiorious bus hogs and a lot of mobo manufacturers have pointed fingers at them for system instability due to that.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Oh one other thing that may help (but is pretty obvious) is make sure your hard disk and DVD drive are on different controllers.

[sledgehammer89 (sledgehammer89)]

Hello Sitsofe,

> make sure your hard disk and DVD drive are on different controllers.

Thanks for this hint, but this is one of the 1st lesson on configure a PC (I'm building PCs since more than 10 years ;)

Harddrive access is one point where I'm looking for this problem. But eg. hdparm -tT /dev/hda shows me nearly the same transfer rates on dapper like on breezy, slackware (or maybe all other distributions when I set hdparm properbly)

yes, I can add some buffering on eg. beep-media-player, but is only a workaround and no solution, cause other distributions shows me the same buffer settings.

I have only 3 major (for me) problems on the (very very nice:) dapper and hopefully these problems went away with the release.

Maybe I search on the wrong place for my problem?

Drivers are nearly the same (2.6.1x, alsa, nvidia-binary) on 3 distributions now at my harddisc (breezy, dapper, slackware). I don't think it's a driver problem, because I have seen the same choppy sound on Fedora but for eg. not on Suse since one year when I notice this "problem" the 1st time (I see and check this choppy sound problem on every distribution I test)

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Apologies for stating the obvious.

Hmm I was going ask whether you were using OSS on slack but you've already answered that question and you said transfer speeds on all distros are pretty similar...

What does top say your system load is during the dropouts on Ubuntu vs Slackware? Does iostat (you'll have to have sysstat installed to get it) show similar results on both distros too? Can you reproduce the problem with command line sound players like mpg123 on the console? I'm out of ideas on how to narrow this one down...

[sledgehammer89 (sledgehammer89)]

I'll go to test your suggestions this week and give you every useful information I get.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

We are closing this bug report as it lacks the information, described in the previous comments, we need to investigate the problem further. However, please reopen it if you can give us the missing information and feel free to submit bug reports in the future.