Swap activated but never used

**cholericfun** · October 10th, 2009

so are you actually sure your memory issue is causing the video problem? (whats your memory load when watching?)
i dont really see how swap would help though, if video is on swap, it will still be slow to load into RAM.

**dude2425** · October 10th, 2009

Originally Posted by cholericfun

so are you actually sure your memory issue is causing the video problem? (whats your memory load when watching?)
i dont really see how swap would help though, if video is on swap, it will still be slow to load into RAM.

No, I'm not sure. I just couldn't think of anything else that could cause that problem, and I just happened to notice the swap partition completely unused while troubleshooting that problem.

The video on the swap partition while watching it would be a problem. However the swap partition would be a great place to put everything else while the video gets free roam of a good chunk of ram.

I'm open to other explanations regarding my video problem. I could very well be completely mistaken regarding the swap thing. It just seemed logical to me that the video was taking up too much ram and all the background stuff that I was not immediately using at the time was not being swapped as it should.

I'll load up a video in a few minutes and have a look at /proc/meminfo and return with results.

**sgosnell** · October 10th, 2009

A slow internet connection is a frequent cause of stutter. This could be from general internet congestion or from a more localized problem, either at the server or your end. Assuming the videos are flash, are you using the Adobe plugin, or the freeware one?

**dude2425** · October 10th, 2009

Not flash, or anything streamed over the net. It's just a standard xvid mpeg 4 on my harddrive.

**jpkotta** · October 10th, 2009

SMplayer has a cache setting. You could try tweaking that. In any case, this sounds like a video player problem more than a Linux kernel problem.

**sgosnell** · October 10th, 2009

What player are you using for the videos? Some are better than others.

**dude2425** · October 11th, 2009

Originally Posted by sgosnell

What player are you using for the videos? Some are better than others.

I've attempted Totem, MPlayer (with a few different settings changed), Xine, VLC, and probably some others. All the same problem.

MPlayer handled it better though. It tried to fix it and catch the frames back up to the audio, but it didn't really work very well.

I just gave it a shot about an hour ago and couldn't reproduce it, but this is under different circumstances. In this situation I had closed Chromium, had compcache 0.6 enabled with my swap partition as a backing swap, and exactly half as memlimit_kb. I am also now running a kernel with BFS by Con Kolivas patched in, and Totem was set to SCHED_ISO.

This seems to be working alright for me so far, I'll check some of the shows I've already watched later on and see if it's still a problem. I'll even leave Chromium open.