Hi,

I am running Skype on a P-III Notebook using both, Windows 2000 and Linux. Under Windows Skype works fine, although I cannot use any other heavy-CPU-load programs at the same time. Under Linux, however, the performance is so bad that Skype is not really usable at all. Also the connection during 5 tries or so always broke down after a while (but worked again when calling again).

Any clues? Is it just bad programming/porting to Linux? Have others of you similar issues? Or is it my system with ... whatever, sounddriver or so? Any hints appreciated ...

Lintux

Hard to tell, for me Skype works as good on Linux as on Windows, when it can access to kernel emulated OSS /dev/dsp. When piping through sound-daemon I get a very long delay, playing around with the buffer sizes does not help.

It has been some time since I compiled my kernel, but I should have kernel-based sound. I will check later. However I am running on a kind-of-old kernel (2.4.22), so maybe an update to a newer system would help. That's on my to-do-list anyway. Well, thx for your answer and I will see about the performance. For now I use Windows if I need to talk for long ... Sorry as I am about that

All the best ...

So how fast is your P3?

Linux has a lot more things going on than most windows machines. Are you constrained by memory or anything like that?

PIII running at 600 MHz - but Notebook, those are usually a bit slower than Desktops. I got half a Gig of Memory, but by time the memory usually gets used up (mostly for cache). But I even tried stopping all other applications, so I had only X and Skype running - it was still bad

Well don't worry about the cache usage, Linux is very smart about that. If your SWAP is not full just let it take care of memory by itself.

600 is above the minimum, I run Skype on a 433 mhz under windows, and a 500 celeron in Linux. You are right that 600 laptops are usaully throtteled down a bit.

What do you mean with bad? I guess all your CPU-power was not used!

And it runs smooth on your System? What Linux are you using then? Can you have other applications running? I tried to stop everything I can now, but that doesn't help. And I am currently not able to make an upgrade to a newer kernel, since I don't have the space to backup my stuff. But I am working on that



Well, true. Skype seems to have an average load of about 50% CPU-time. However the sound quality is very bad (always, not only when XOSView shows peaks in the CPU-usage. Maybe this is more an issue with the sound-chip/-driver when?
lspci shows ...
---snip---
00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: ALi Corporation M5451 PCI AC-Link Controller Audio Device (rev 01)
---snip---
lsmod shows ...
---snip---
snd-pcm-oss 41092 0 (autoclean)
snd-mixer-oss 14008 1 (autoclean) [snd-pcm-oss]
snd-ali5451 13444 1
snd-pcm 64772 0 [snd-pcm-oss snd-ali5451]
snd-page-alloc 5692 0 [snd-pcm]
snd-timer 15428 0 [snd-pcm]
snd-ac97-codec 40488 0 [snd-ali5451]
snd 31172 0 [snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss snd-ali5451 snd-pcm snd-timer snd-ac97-codec]
soundcore 3940 3 [snd]
---snip---
Sound was working well with both OSs, but lately I am having soundcard-brakedowns when playing under windows from time to time. Any further clues?