[MPlayer-users] Re: MPlayer discountinuity with SuSE Linux 8.2

[Jonathan Rogers]

Karai Csaba wrote:
> 2. MPlayer worked properly after system reboots, but if I ran other 
>    programs before using MPlayer, the stops came again. At these times
>    the winchester was reading or writing something heavily.
>    Top showed, that there was little free memory in the system, but
>    100MByte was buffered and other 100 MByte was cached. The used swap
>    memory size was one or two MBytes. I've noticed at using KDE, that
>    there were sometimes winchester operations longing for a second or
>    more without even touching the computer or starting an application.
>    These mistical winchester reads or writes stopped when I stopped 
>    KDE and the X server. The DMA of the winchester is of course on.

That's pretty weird. Is it possible that the drive is dying? You might 
want to try monitoring it with some SMART tools. It's also possible 
there's some daemon doing some kind of indexing that stops when there's 
keyboard or mouse input.

<URL:http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/>
<URL:http://www.linalco.com/comunidad.html>

Jonathan Rogers