[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] problem with dspmp3sink (was: problem with gstreamer and dsppcm)

[From: Siarhei Siamashka]

On Monday 21 August 2006 18:34, Charles 'Buck' Krasic wrote:

> Just in case you have not done it already, enabling swap in your device
> can help a lot to prevent out-of-memory errors.    Maybe this will help
> with mplayer/gstreamer stability.
>
> I personally suspect  a design flaw in the current Linux VM subsystem.
> I've observed that if an application allocates memory rapidly,  the
> kernel may fail to reclaim pages quickly enough from the page and buffer
> caches (they are only caches after all), so it actually denies the
> allocation request.     For example, with zero swap, on a machine with
> 1G of ram, and >500M of it pseudo-free (used by caches), I've seen
> moderate allocations fail--like when starting an application like
> firefox.    Enabling even a small amount of swap seems to dramatically
> change this behaviour.

Thanks for the information, this is interesting. I tried swap a long time ago
on IT2005, that was done in order to make gcc work on Nokia 770 to try
compiling something before I installed scratchbox :) Anyway, I did not like
the stability as gcc started to fail with internal compiler errors. So I
decided not to use swap as long as it is enough memory for what I need.

Also there was some swap related report about the problem with mplayer:
http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showpost.php?p=20068&postcount=96

But maybe I should give swap another try on IT2006 and see if it helps to
improve stability.

By the way, I already asked this question in the mailing list long time ago,
but are there any tools for hardware diagnostics on Nokia 770? Something 
like memtest86 could probably be very useful.

Though availablility of hardware diagnostics tools could probably result in
more devices getting returned for replacement with otherwise undetected
problems and have negative impact on Nokia profit (just joking).