Re: esound eats CPU cycles

[nelson-gnome crynwr com]

Ronald de Man writes:
 > I have the lastest version from CVS. No sound is playing, just
 > esd running in the background. Esd should be sleeping, and strace
 > shows that it is. But the performance decrease is real.

Might you have slow DMA on your combination of motherboard and sound
card?  Nearly all sound cards use DMA to transfer data, and I would be 
very surprised if esd closed the sound device -- starting and stopping 
the DMA often produces a click.  The device driver

Stop esd and try this:   dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/dsp bs=8k count=20

I'll bet it clicks.  It does on mine.  While it's running, do your
gzip test.  On my system it doesn't show any performance decrease.
Does it on yours?

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-russ nelson <rn-sig@crynwr.com>  http://crynwr.com/~nelson
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