GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 465814
rhythmbox uses to much cpu while playing mp3s!
Last modified: 2009-01-26 22:09:14 UTC
hi, i've a amd athlon 64 3000+. rhythmbox takes about 25% of cpu while playing. that's to much, mplayer takes about 1-2%. all plugins are disabled.
Hello spam@abma.de Could you give us some more information? What distribution do you use? what exact version of rhytmbox 0.10.x x = ? rhythmbox uses the gstreamer framework to play mp3 files. Mplayer has its own implementation. Could you see if you get the same performance problems if you just use the gstreamer framework to play an mp3 file? (i.e. without using rhythmbox) Tino.
I'm using gentoo amd64 and GNOME rhythmbox 0.10.1. with totem ( GStreamer 0.10.11 backend) the cpu-usage is nearly the same as with mplayer. Matthias
Any way you can profile this and see where it spends this much CPU time? Riggs
Are you playing the exact same file with the different programs here? I wouldn't expect to see any noticeable difference between totem and rhythmbox here. It takes a lot more CPU time to play files that require resampling (eg 22.5kHz files when the audio device only does 44.1kHz) due to GStreamer's resampler being rather unoptimized.
A Debian user has filed a similar bug report: "i've got an athlon 64 and an athlon xp, both with a "creative soundblaster live!" pci sound card and an intel ac97 onboard sound chip. on both machines playback works with a very low cpu load on the sb live card. when i redirect the sound output to the onboard card, rhythmbox eats up nearly exactly 50% of the cpu on both machines. i used gconf's "musicadiosink" entry to redirect the music output, which i had to point at 'alsasink device="hw:1,0"'. when i have rhythmbox use a "dmix" virtual sound card on top of the onboard sound card, rhythmbox does not use half of the cpu time. here's my asound.conf for the onboard intel card: ---[ snip ]--- pcm.nv_dmix { type plug slave.pcm "dmixer" } pcm.dmixer { type dmix ipc_key 1024 slave { pcm "hw:1,0" period_time 0 period_size 1024 buffer_size 4096 rate 48000 } bindings { 0 0 1 1 } } ctl.dmixer { type hw card 1 } ---[ snap ]---- i can reproduce the cpu-intensive behaviour, with rhythmbox packages 0.11.2-1 and 0.10.1-1+b2. i didn't try any other versions of the package." I suggested testing the pipeline from the README to find out if the problem is in Rhythmbox or GStreamer, but it seems it doesn't follow the configuration from gconf? For the full discussion see: http://bugs.debian.org/449471
Hey Tino :) Your question in comment #1 has been answered more or less in comment #5. I am thus reopening.
Once again, this is just gstreamer's audioresample being slow. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 385061 ***