[vorbis] Why is ogg123 so much slower than XMMS?

[safemode]

On Sun, 2001-12-16 at 20:16, Joel wrote:
> > > I belive cpu-time isn't always reported correctly for xmms and its
> > treads,
> > > (at least when using top to
> > > report). I didn't notice any change in %-of cpu-time between
> > xmms(stopped)
> > > or xmms(playing). Is this true
> > > in your case too?
> > 
> > When stopped there are four threads of XMMS, none is taking CPU time.
> > When playing two more are created, and totally they eat 0.3~0.5% on my
> > PII/233 (isn't noticeable, is it? :)
> 
> That's why I suspect something is left out. I know from experience that a P75 _barely_ handles mp3 decoding (choppy sound). Suppose decoding took 2% of your CPU-time, then (with some mathematic approximation) it should be sufficent with a PII running at 0.02*233= 4.66MHz! Im my eyes, this is most unrealistic.
I was ok with the rest of the argument except this one really.  You cant
compare clock rates as the deciding factor of cpu performance.  I
thought we knew better than that.  I'm willing to chock up the near 0%
cpu usage of current players on modern cpu's, video players too even as
a kernel problem but using some kind of ratio to compare cpu's using
different instruction sets via clockrates is just silly. 
on the other hand, perhaps they are using that much time, then it would
be easier figuring out the situation that would be possible for them to
do that since it would be a rather narrow amount of choices rather than
figuring out what way it could be wrong, where you have an uncountable
amount of places a coding error or design flaw could be found in.  

Even if the clockrates were the only thing different i'd still have a
problem with this argument.  because the clockrates aren't even measured
the same way on newer cpu's as they were back in the pentium days. They
aren't even measured the same way between amd and intel currently.  

If you look at current cpu's,  they can do X amount of instructions, 
now P75 could only do 1 instruction at a time, current cpu's like the
athlon K7 can do 4 instructions at a time at most (optimized for it)  2
in other optimized code and so on.   The T-birds of late can do 8 if i'm
not mistaken,  micro-ops they call them,  perhaps this is the P4, either
way it doesn't matter which cpu does it.  just that newer cpu's can do
on average 3 times more at a time not to mention the amount of times it
can do that per second has increased exponentially.   So a well
optimized player can get more things done at a time in less time per
second on a modern cpu.  something that took a P75, say 90% of it's
power to run could be say chopped nearly in half (a modest number) to
say 50% if it could do more than one instruction per second and most of
the instructions in a decoder are repetitive and take up much of the cpu
time.   Now scale the instructions per second up to current cpus and you
get from a few tens of millions to a few hundred billions.  so now
you're down to around 5%.  now add in the improved cache designs and
branch prediction and prefetching (not even counting the better
motherboard designs that make memory access easier and faster) and i
think it's very possible to get down to near zero cpu usage on a modern
day x86 cpu for such repetitive tasks such as decoding.  
  
> > From a look at /proc I find that the player threads eat 0.02s of user
> > time and 0.2s of kernel time per minute of playing, so it is truly
> > 0.3%.  Therefore, if the time calculated is wrong, it is kernel's
> > fault.
> 
> That seems to be the case, (Will we ever find a reliable kernel, anyways? ;-) unless the guys hacking xmms have found some miracle way of playing mp3's
> 
> I think other mp3-players (like madplay or mpg123) will yield values more 'in leage' with ogg123. I'll test it someday when I get my hands om my linux computer again.
> 
> -Joel
> 
> --- >8 ----
> List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
> Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
> To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-request at xiph.org'
> containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
> Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.
> 

<p><p>--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.