ports/56597: bad startup perfomance of mpg123 with pcm/oss/dsp

[Eugene Grosbein]

The following reply was made to PR ports/56597; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Eugene Grosbein <eugen at grosbein.pp.ru>
To: mh at mpg123.de
Cc: bug-followup at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: ports/56597: bad startup perfomance of mpg123 with pcm/oss/dsp
Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2004 15:37:45 +0700

 Hi, Michael Hipp!
 
 It's about your excellent audio player mpg123.
 
 It plays very well even with old Pentium machine, but version mpg123-0.59r
 has some simple but annoying (mis-)feature in FreeBSD 4.x: it spends
 too much time inside audio_capabilities() function that is not neccessary
 for FreeBSD. Full description of benchmark may be seen here:
 
 http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/56597
 
 In short: getrusage() shows that it spends 22 seconds (Pentium 90)
 for useless (in case of FreeBSD) work just before it opens media file.
 FreeBSD developer responded:
 
 > The problem is that mpg123 tries to determine what formats are
 > supported by the device by simply trying all possible combinations.
 > This doesn't make much sense in FreeBSD since the kernel will accept
 > pretty much any format (the only restriction I know of is a 25-Hz
 > granularity for the sample rate) and if necessary convert the data to
 > whatever format the device actually supports.
 
 Would you like that I dig this case further and produce a path you could
 review? Or, perhaps, you prefer to fix that yourself?
 
 Eugene Grosbein