Performance Issues

[Q]

> 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.

Do you have DMA enabled on your DVD drive (you can check using
'atacontrol mode <channel>')?

> 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.

You can actually compile in dvd menu support into mplayer, but I'm not
sure if it works as well as Xine. I haven't used either for playing DVDs
in some time.

> 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. 

I would use whichever works best. I don't use sound much at all so I
can't really help with that.. but when I have used sound daemons in the
past they have always caused me problems unless they were running with a
fairly decent sized buffer cache.

> 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.

Try running 'top' or some other sort of system monitor to see exactly
what's happening.

Seeya...Q