On Fri, May 18 2001, Eduard Hasenleithner wrote:
> I have a problem with the buffering mechanism of my blockdevice,
> namely a ide_scsi DVD-ROM drive. After inserting a DVD and reading
> data linearly from the DVD, an excessive amount of buffer memory gets
> allocated.
>
> This can easily be reproduced with
> cat /dev/sr0 > /dev/null
>
> Remember, nearly the same task is carried out when playing a DVD.
>
> As a result the system performance goes down. I'm still able to use
> my applications, but es every single piece of unused memory is swapped
> out, and swapping in costs a certain amount of time.
That's why streaming media applications like a dvd player should use raw
I/O -- to bypass system cache. See /dev/raw*
-- Jens Axboe- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed May 23 2001 - 21:00:30 EST