cdrecord performance

[Andre Costa]

Hi James,

On Sat, 31 Jul 2004 20:46:49 -0400
James Drabb <JDrabb at tampabay.rr.com> wrote:

> Hey group,
> 
> I am runing FC2 with kernel 2.6.7-1.  My system is an Athlon 2800+, 
> 512MB 400MHz DDR and an ATA 133 drive.  When I try to burn an audio
> file with cdrecord, the system becomes very unresponsive while the
> disk is being burnt.  top show only about 2% CPU usage, yet the mouse
> is very jerky and doing any tasks during the burn are very, very slow
> (normally the system is very fast).

I've seen this too, on my machine at work. It's a P4 with HT-enabled,
and when I start cdrecord (either through k3b or through xcdroast) CPU
gets an almost constant 95+% load. Running top I can see that
ksoftirqd_CPU is the one to blame, eating a lot of CPU cycles. It is
really weird and annoying. I don't know if this is related to the fact
that I disabled ACPI and APIC on that box.

> I have a dual boot with winders XP, and if I burn an audio CD under 
> windows, there is no system resonse problems at all and I am able to
> do other tasks during the burn.

Can't comment on that, that machine is pure Linux (well, it does have a
Win2k partition, but I never used that ;))

> The cdrecord command I use is:
> 
> cdrecord -eject -v -pad -audio -dev=ATAPI:/dev/hdc -speed=40 file.wav
> 
> Here is the info on the DVDRW drive:
> 
> jim at keelie $ hdparm -i /dev/hdc
> 
> /dev/hdc:
> 
>   Model=LITE-ON DVDRW LDW-451S, FwRev=GSB6, SerialNo=
>   Config={ Fixed Removeable DTR<=5Mbs DTR>10Mbs nonMagnetic }
>   RawCHS=0/0/0, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=0
>   BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=0kB, MaxMultSect=0
>   (maybe): CurCHS=0/0/0, CurSects=0, LBA=yes, LBAsects=0
>   IORDY=yes, tPIO={min:227,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
>   PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
>   DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
>   UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 *udma2
>   AdvancedPM=no
>   Drive conforms to: device does not report version:
> 
>   * signifies the current active mode

In case it helps, mine is:

/dev/hdc:

 Model=HL-DT-ST GCE-8525B, FwRev=1.03, SerialNo=
 Config={ Fixed Removeable DTR<=5Mbs DTR>10Mbs nonMagnetic }
 RawCHS=0/0/0, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=0
 BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=0kB, MaxMultSect=0
 (maybe): CurCHS=0/0/0, CurSects=0, LBA=yes, LBAsects=0
 IORDY=yes, tPIO={min:227,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 
 DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 
 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 *udma2 
 AdvancedPM=no

 * signifies the current active mode

Best,

Andre

-- 
Andre Oliveira da Costa