My processors are maxing out

[xmjsilverx]

I am running Ubuntu 14.04 on my HTPC using an Amd A-Series APU A6-6400K BLK EDT 3900Mhz and 4GB Ram. I do not have a separate video card. I had noticed that the system seemed unusually slow with this set-up from the beginning but it seems to be getting worse. When using xbmc it lags out to the the point where I can't use the directional pad to select anything for minutes at a time. I found that usually one of the 2 processors was maxed out at 100% during these issues. I thought it was only an xbmc issue and submitted a debug log and got no help. I was messing with it outside of xbmc, I played an HD movie that was stored on the computer and watched another HD video on youtube and they both hit 100%, with just one playing they were around 78%. The only program I know running besides these was the myth-tv backend. From what I had read, the processor set-up I went with was overboard if anything. Is it possible I got a bad processor or is something causing them to bog down? Here is a screen shot of the system monitor with 2 HD movies playing. On a side note, occasionaly the audio is messed up and sounds muffled and vibraty. Any ideas on that either? A restart fixes that.

[Yellow Pasque]

Playing HD videos is going to use the CPU, and if video acceleration isn't working, it's going to use a lot of CPU. Do you max out the CPU when not playing video? If so, use htop to figure out what is causing it.

What video driver are you using (open source or the proprietary Catalyst/fglrx)? If you're using open-source driver, do you have vdpau set up properly? (Look at vdpauinfo):

sudo apt-get install vdpauinfo
vdpauinfo

[xmjsilverx]

Thanks for the reply. I was told I went way overboard with my processor for building an HTPC so I assumed playing HD videos would be easily accomplished with it. I was planning on installing up to 4 tuners which would allow me to watch 4 shows from the same backend. When I am watching TV using XBMC or really using anything on XBMC I have terrible lag issues and when watching the processors one of them is always hitting 100%. I am not sure what htop is but I will look into it. I will look into all of this stuff tomorrow. Thanks again.

[xmjsilverx]

Ok, I installed and ran htop while playing 1 HD movie. A few times it spiked to near 100% but stayed around 60-70% the majority of the time. I am using an AMD proprietary driver for video so I am guessing I don't need to look at vdpauinfo. I am not sure what everything means when reading the processes on htop so I posted a pic. This is while the HD movie is playing. I noticed the top process was always showing 100% or more. I am not saying you are wrong but from what I read and people I talked to on XBMC, they are saying this processor is overkill so if that is the case, I don't think watching one movie on an HTPC with an overkill processor should be running at 70%, that doesn't really leave room for recording shows and doing anything else like browsing the electronic program guide. If you are correct and I need a better processor I have no problem going that route, I just want to make sure that is going to fix it.

[xmjsilverx]

Ok, I may have figured something out. I was monitoring xbmc with xbmc system monitor, htop, and ubunutu system monitor. I noticed that it all seemed fine when I was in the windowed view of xbmc but when going to full screen it all went crazy like usual. As soon as I entered full screen the processors took truns bouncing off 100% or close to it, you can see it on the xbmc monitor and on the system monitor graph when I exit. So what does this mean? Do I just need to reinstall xbmc?
Here is a link to the video.
http://vid181.photobucket.com/albums...pskt0krslf.mp4

[mastablasta]

the processor is overthetop. XBMC runs on raspberry Pi with 700Mhz CPU that runs like 350Mhz Pentium 2.

anyway - htop is hswoing many totem processes opened. someone else that is using this would be able to explain if this is normal or not.

but what bothers me is I see you are using unity desktop and then add xbmc desktop to it. I am a bit puzzled as to why you need the desktop if this is HTPC. have you tried installing only xmbc on it? orxbmcbuntu or something like that.

on raspberry pi there is a lot of optimisation needed like turning off the RSS and similar. this shouldn't be needed with this CPU but i am not sure what it means if it has many things from regular desktop running in background.

[xmjsilverx]

I used ubuntu because I am more familiar with it. I initially installed xmbcbuntu but I felt lost with it. I got a response on the xbmc forum and he thinks it is a problem with my video driver so I am going to try installing the radeon oss.

[Yellow Pasque]

The proprietary driver could do some decode acceleration through the xvba-vaapi wrapper: http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubu...r_.28VA-API.29
Supposedly, an upcoming Catalyst release will support VA-API directly and eliminate the need to use the xvba wrapper: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTg1NTE

It's been a while since I've used the open-source drivers radeon driver to do vdpau on an AMD card, but xbmc devs seem to be happy with them enough to recommend open-source drivers over Catalyst for video playback.

[xmjsilverx]

Ok, so are you saying I should just switch to the open source driver for my AMD? I went with the proprietary so I could eliminate screen tearing but I'd be willing to try the open source.

[Yellow Pasque]

If you would prefer the proprietary driver, then I would try the advice here first: http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubu...r_.28VA-API.29
If you can get vainfo to output supported profiles, then you can try it out by setting your video player to use VA-API output. I experimented with using the video decode acceleration on a RadeonHD 4550 a few years ago and it did offload a decent amount of processing to the GPU, even if it's not as good as using VDPAU on an nvidia card.