Hi Russell, Thanks for your detailed and considered comments and thanks to the others that responded also. On Sun, 2013-04-21 at 19:58 +1000, Russell Coker wrote:
On Sun, 21 Apr 2013, David Zuccaro <david.zuccaro@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
For the "choppy" movies, what player are you using?
Totem Also I don't have a video card, I'm using an onboard graphics controller: 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82945G/GZ Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02) This is the motherboard: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=2304#sp I put in an extra 2GB stick so now its memory capacity has been maxed out.
If you use mplayer then run it from the command-line and it'll tell you if the CPU is too slow.
One of my systems has an Intel E4600 CPU (2.4GHz dual core) and it plays 1080p movies poorly (drops frames and gives mplayer warnings). Sometimes I use avconv to scale down movies before watching them. Movie playing isn't that important to me so scaling a movie file to 720p and then scaling it up again at play back time while theoretically losing quality in practice doesn't impact my enjoyment.
Using mplayer seems to give much better performance than totem.
Anyway that system doesn't have the fastest graphics card, my main purchase criteria were supporting a 27" monitor at full resolution (2560*1440 rules out lots of graphics cards) and having no fan.
If video performance was important to me I'd investigate a new video card before a new system.
When iceweasel performs poorly how much swap is in use and is the hard drive light on a lot?
No. This is not a swap issue. No swap is in use just complex (buggy resource intensive, badly put together web pages. I think I will make do with what I have at this stage. I will definitely need a bigger HD and as you say swapping to a new HD is going to be a PITA but it needs to be done. top also gives memory usage. free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3288 3122 165 0 50 2598 -/+ buffers/cache: 473 2814 Swap: 2863 0 2863
Iceweasel performance is probably limited by RAM use - although it's apparently not as bad as Chromium.
How much RAM does your system support?
4GB
Many Intel systems have crappy chipsets that limit you to 4GB physical address space of which ~700MB is reserved for IO giving a maximum of 3.3GB of usable RAM.
Looks like I have one of those. :( I added /sbin/sysctl vm.swappiness=05 to my start up script as Steve suggested. Seems to have helped but not sure. In summary I think I will do some upgrading before I buy a new system; and look into getting a graphics card. Thanks everyone for your comments.