[MPlayer-users] How to pause mencoder

[Adam Nielsen]

> It's not a problem with process scheduling, that's done rather well
> (at least in 2.4, dont know about 2.6), but the problem is the
> PC architecture which has a poor I/O system that blocks everything
> and Linux which has problem handling big I/O loads.

Well, at the risk of starting a flamewar, Windows never used to make my mouse 
cursor go jerky while it was heavily accessing the disk... (and yes, I've got 
DMA enabled.)  So it's definitely a Linux issue.  I tried installing the 
preemptive kernel patch a while ago though, and that made a big improvement 
which is why I think it's a multitasking issue.  If the kernel is stuck in a 
long I/O operation as you say and has blocked, then no other processes can 
run (which is presumably why the performance is even worse when playing over 
a network, even when the network is nowhere near its bandwidth limits and 
mplayer has a huge -cache.)

And yes, I do agree that process scheduling is done well in Linux, but it 
would still be nice to have an "idle" priority like in win32 - then you can 
run a program in the background and it will give up *all* its CPU cycles 
should the need arise (as opposed to nice -19 which only gives up most of the 
CPU cycles.)  It sure beats manually suspending distributed.net/SETI/etc. to 
speed up mencoder ;-)

Cheers,
Adam.