Re: [Banshee-List] CPU usage

[Aaron Bockover <abockover novell com>]

On Thu, 2006-01-26 at 14:06 +0100, Nil Gradisnik wrote:
> I'd like to report banshee CPU usage when playing mp3s.
> 
> On my laptop: Pentium M 1.73, 512Mb DDR2 ram,...
> I get around 4-5% of CPU usage when banshee is in playback. I compiled
> banshee from CVS, disabled daap and helix, using mono 1.1.3.2 and
> gstreamer 0.8.11

Um. That is not bad at all. Either way, the playing happens using
GStreamer, so that's what's eating the CPU. In terms of playback, all
Banshee does is check the pipeline state and position to update the UI.
4-5% is extremely reasonable. If you do not think so, perhaps another
processor will help.

> Then I tested banshee on developmental gstreamer 0.10 backend,
> compiled and tested CPU usage again. It was around 13-15%. Now I think
> that's alot, way too much. I know gstreamer backend is developmental,
> but I just want to report that.

This backend is experimental, but again, the work is done in GStreamer,
so that's what's eating the CPU. 13-15 is a little heavy, but in my
testing, it's actually better than 0.8 (around 3%). Because it is
experimental, I cannot commit time at this moment to finishing it or to
do any further testing.

The Helix backend is not so reasonable... it eats about 25% of my CPU,
but there's nothing that can be done about that in Banshee. The problem
is in Helix. RealPlayer has the same problem, because it uses the Helix
engine for playback.

> Is this normal ? I really like the gstreamer 0.10 because it's much
> more responsive and fast than 0.8.

0.10 is much better, but at the moment the transcoding and ripping
backends have not been ported to 0.10, so 0.8 is still recommended.

Cheers,
Aaron