Performance Issues

[Loren M. Lang]

I have been using freebsd for a couple of months now, and have
enjoyed it thus far, but there are a couple of performance
issues I've been having with it.  Previously I was running linux
on this same hardware, so all this issues are freebsd specific.

Xine seems to have trouble playing movies at the beginning, it's
choppy for the first several seconds, then resumes the movie normally
after it's in a little ways.  Even stopping and restarting, it still
exhibits the same behavior at the beginning of a movie file.  Also,
watching dvd's on this computer is slightly choppy, but very slight.
mplayer seems to do fine for dvd's and movies, but mplayer has no menu
support for dvd's.  I haven't had this trouble with xine on linux
using much older versions to just slightly more recent than xine in
the freebsd ports and I would like to have it fixed.

Also, artsd has troubles.  The sound is slightly scratchy coming out
it and after it's been running a while, gaim sounds playing through
artsd don't quite finish and echos the last bit of the sound,
sounding all scratchy.  Esd seems to work better, but everything I've
read and seen about those two always claims that artsd is much better
and higher quality than esd.  After seeing the unmaintained home of
esd vs. the nice home of artsd, I'd agree.  Xine in linux I know had
particular problems with esd while watching dvds where artsd worked
fine.  Not sure about xine and esd in freebsd.

Lastly, the system seems slow at times after I haven't been doing much
work in it, especially when I have many windows open in mozilla.  I
think this is just because the system is having to swap in memory, but
I don't remember it being such a big problem in linux.  I'm using
freebsd 4.9 on a PIII 600Mhz with 128 meg ram.  Freebsd has a 256 meg
swap as the default of install made it.  In linux, I only had a 128 meg
swap.

Am I just having bad luck, or is something just misconfigured on my
system.  I'd like to get it back to the point I had it with linux,
or I might just switch back.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.

-- 
I sense much NT in you.
NT leads to Bluescreen.
Bluescreen leads to downtime.
Downtime leads to suffering.
NT is the path to the darkside.
Powerful Unix is.

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