Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 167207
xmms too busy when idle
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:12 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050720 Fedora/1.0.6-1.1.fc4 Firefox/1.0.6 Description of problem: When xmms is not playing music, just sitting around (paused or stopped), it nevertheless sucks up CPU. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xmms-1.2.10-16.i386 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Start xmms, but don't ask it to play anything. Start up top or strace to monitor its activity. Actual Results: The sucker uses up lots of CPU (20% of an old P2-266), just sitting there. strace indicates lots of activity (gettimeofday; checking on /tmp/xmms_USER, inter-thread idle chitchat. Expected Results: when idle, it should not use up lots of CPU. it should not poll so frequently / heavily. Additional info: Maybe all this polling activity is also going on when the program is actually decoding/playing stuff. Its CPU consumption is rather high.
Thank you for taking time to file a bug report. For fedora core 4 xmms was moved to extras please file bugs for xmms against Fedora Extras. Thank you.
Hmmm, xmms 1.x is pretty much dead, which is one of the many reasons it has been moved to Extras, and is kept there only for people who would have really missed it if it had gone away completely. This is typically an xmms design or coding issue that would need a non negligeable amount of work to fix, so I doubt anyone will want to do it. Have you tried beemp-media-player (bmp)? It's based on xmms, ported to gtk2, and actively maintained, so even if it suffers from the same problem it has much higher chances of getting fixed.
just tried bmp. it does not seem to suffer from the same problem, so I somewhat reluctantly switched over. (fwiw, gtk2-ness is of zero value to me).
Interesting to know (that bmp doesn't have this problem). About the gtk2-ness being of zero value : If you're using Fedora Core 4, it probably is since you'll probably already have gtk2 applications running, and no gtk1 ones, so it will save loading an extra library. Anyway, until xmms2 at least (which is in _very_ early stage, I tried it last week), bmp is the way to go. I'll probably be closing this bug as WONTFIX if you don't mind too much.