[MPlayer-users] DVD playback issue on older notebook with not so old Linux kernel

[Stephen Mollett]

Hi,

On 15/05/2020 10:05, Erik Auerswald wrote:
> ...
> The streaming IO workload of DVD playback adds all of the movie data to
> the page cache.  This results in filling the RAM, and now RAM contents
> can be written to disk, i.e., swapped out, instead of just dropping
> older page cache entries.
 > ...

Just as another data point which may help with pinning down the exact 
problem, I seem to recall coming across essentially the same behaviour 
when copying a DVD to hard-disk with dvdbackup on a low-memory (less 
than DVD-size) system - the system became choppy and thrashed the disk 
as everything that could be swapped out was to make way for the DVD data.

I didn't bother investigating further (I simply made a mental note to 
avoid doing it on my laptop in future) but if memory serves me 
correctly, the system monitor widget I had on the desktop at the time 
showed the memory as allocated to "buffers", as opposed to "cache". When 
dvdbackup exited, all the buffer memory was freed and the system 
gradually returned to normal.

Stephen