On Sat, 9 Feb 2002, Julio Merino wrote:

> As I said in a reply to some message, X was also crashing for me.
> The problem seems to be with XMMS. First thing, when it's running
> X behaves REALLY BAD; everything is slow and unresponsiveness...
> And it made my X crash when I put it to play a radio station
> (second time I tried it went fine).
>
> If I use mpg123 or gqmpeg, everything is ok... What can be
> happening?

xmms is a real processor hog, especially with the window dressing turned
on. Check "top" while it's running the O-scope thingy. Maybe your
hardware just can't handle it. It also tries to keep the sound
hardware's buffer full, so it doesn't ever have to block, but if your
soundcard has a very small buffer, all that extra calculation would just
increase the load on the system. I'm guessing "mpg123" just rams bytes
into the audio device, and blocks until they're played out.

Did you build "xmms" from the latest sources? There were a couple of
patches dropped into the package, in May and June last year, that may
help the situation.

Frederick