Very poor performance when extracting audio CDs

Bug #355565 reported by Charlie Halford
24
This bug affects 8 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Rhythmbox
Expired
Low
rhythmbox (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Low
Ubuntu Desktop Bugs

Bug Description

1) Release: Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 Beta

2) apt-cache policy rhythmbox: 0.12.0-0ubuntu2

3) When extracting audio CDs in other operating systems on the same computer, the conversion process takes under 5 minutes, and allows me full use of my computer as the process takes place.

4) When extracting an audio CD in rhythmbox, the process took well over 5 minutes, and took a large amount of CPU, leaving my computer very unusable. Attempts to play other music within rhythmbox while the extraction was taking place results in stuttering playback.

While the extraction process is a computationally expensive operation, it should NOT leave the system in an unusable state.

Revision history for this message
Pedro Villavicencio (pedro) wrote :

thanks for the report Charlie, could you get a rhythmbox debug log? please run rhythmbox as : rhythmbox --debug &> rhythmbox-debug.txt perform the operation to reproduce the issue and attach the resulting file to the report. does the same happens with sound juicer?

Changed in rhythmbox (Ubuntu):
assignee: nobody → desktop-bugs
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Charlie Halford (soupmonster) wrote :

Attached is the output of rhythmbox --debug.

I tried sound juicer, and it seems slightly quicker, ripping the same CD in about 9m 30s. It seems to affect the speed of my system significantly as well: audio playing starts stuttering, dragging windows, and even typing this bug become unresponsive.

Is this a symptom of something bigger?

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

the bug should be sent to bugzilla.gnome.org by somebody having the issue

Changed in rhythmbox (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → New
Revision history for this message
Charlie Halford (soupmonster) wrote :

Sure thing, I'll do that. Is there a guide on how to link this bug report to the gnome one?

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :
Changed in rhythmbox:
status: Unknown → New
Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

Thank you for sending the bug to GNOME

Changed in rhythmbox (Ubuntu):
status: New → Triaged
Changed in rhythmbox:
importance: Unknown → Low
Revision history for this message
spamoften (spamoften-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

This issue is also reported as # 512098. I marked that bug as a duplicate of this one. My comments below:

The original bug from 2006 still labeled unconfirmed in Rhythmbox.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=358770

There are dozens forum posts in google search on this item all redirecting people to use alternative programs to rip CDs.

Used TOP with "show threads" option to display the rythmbox threads during extract.

The top most CPU bound thread was priority 20 (the nice level for background threads) using ~30% of a CPU core (my laptop is 1.5Ghz dual core Intel x86).

The top IOWait was 0.

Therefore, the process was likely neither CPU or disk bound.

I noticed that the BOINC background worker threads were getting significant CPU time, so I hit "pause" to stop background processing of workloads. This therefore left completely idle CPU on my computer.

Afterwards, the extract performed more quickly, but was still not using 100% CPU or causing IOWaits.

iostat reported no IOWait, similar to top.

In conclusion, it is likely the thread design of the background threads is using a far too aggressive "nice" setting and should be bumped up in both priority and IO nice level so that the extract takes advantage of the available hardware.

It should be obvious that if a user has deliberately clicked on a button to extract a CD, they would prefer that operation take precedent over other background tasks on the computer which they have not necessarily performed a manual and specific action to perform (BOINC is a good example).

This behavior was consistent for both Ubuntu 10.04 and Ubuntu 10.10.

Changed in rhythmbox:
status: New → Expired
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