sndconfig.. and something chewing up resources

I recently reinstalled my whole system, using RedHat 6.2.

In past installs I have always recompiled my kernel to gain sound card support for my Crystal Audio card. This time I had heard about this until 'sndconfig' that came with RedHat so I decided to try it. It worked slickly and now I've got sound. But it appears to be doing sound using some daemons of sorts, ksoundaemon, esd?, kaudio, something like those... and it seems when I run anythign else that is at all processor intensive my sound playback gets coppy or drops out and does funny stuff. I figure I'm just going to recompile my kernel and do it the old way and see if the problem persists. Anyone have any ideas on what's going on?

My machine is a Dell Optiplex, 400mhz, 128MB ram..

Josh

"You can be my Yoko Ono... You can follow me wherever I go..."

 - Barenaked Ladies

You may be right,
the problem is that esd uses too small buffers and doesn't run SCHED_FIFO therefore high CUP/disk load can cause this kind of drouputs.

( try to grep for esd while you are playing sound, to see if it is running)

Anyway a kernel recompile won't help because it's not the kernel the source of the problem.
(sndconfig just insmods the audio drivers, nothing magic :-) )

The problem is very probably the soundserver.

What kind of audio app are you running ?
As far I can tell you I run RH 6.2 and KDE here, and only mpg123 uses esd as default. xmms does direct /dev/dsp output except if you spefify esd in the settings.

Plus try to tune your IDE harddisk with
hdparm -d 1 -c 1 -u 1 /dev/hda (except if it's a crappy old IDE disk)

it helps alot, especially when doing disk I/O.

Benno.