[Bug 13823] cdparanoia is slow

[randallw]

Public bug report changed:
https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/13823

Comment:
Hi all,
Is there any update on this? I've recently changed my sarge box to a breezy box and encountered this problem. I consider this very much to be a bug. My box (celeron 2.4GHz) used to rip *and* encode CDs at better than 6x speed with sarge. Now I'm lucky if I get 3x rip and 1.5x encode. The 1.5x encode is downright emabrrasing and it seems to be because the CPU/bus is taken up with some sort of system activity.
"top" reveals the following:
Cpu(s): 14.3% us,  4.6% sy,  0.0% ni, 29.7% id,  1.1% wa, 49.7% hi,  0.6% si
Mem:    775536k total,   378572k used,   396964k free,    15344k buffers
Swap:  2040212k total,        0k used,  2040212k free,   221556k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 8185 rwayth    17   0  6352 4880  484 R  6.3  0.6   0:00.42 cdparanoia
 8107 rwayth    16   0 29632  16m  12m S  1.7  2.2   0:02.66 konsole

Note "49.7% hi". I'm guessing this is "hardware interrupts"? So it does
not seem to be cdparanoia that is slow, rather something closer to the
hardware.