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  1. 12 Apr, 2008 32 commits
  3. 26 Mar, 2008 3 commits
    • Max Kellermann's avatar
      notify the decoder instead of polling 100hz · bf05ce16
      Max Kellermann authored 
      When the decoder process is faster than the player process, all
decodedd buffers are full at some point in time.  The decoder has to
wait for buffers to become free (finished playing).  It used to do
this by polling the buffer status 100 times a second.

This generates a lot of unnecessary CPU wakeups.  This patch adds a
way for the player process to notify the decoder process that it may
continue its work.

We could use pthread_cond for that, unfortunately inter-process
mutexes/conds are not supported by some kernels (Linux), so we cannot
use this light-weight method until mpd moves to using threads instead
of processes.  The other method would be semaphores, which
historically are global resources with a unique name; this historic
API is cumbersome, and I wanted to avoid it.

I came up with a quite naive solution for now: I create an anonymous
pipe with pipe(), and the decoder process reads on that pipe.  Until
the player process sends data on it as a signal, the decoder process
blocks.

This can be optimized in a number of ways:

- if the decoder process is still working (instead of waiting for
buffers), we could save the write() system call, since there is
nobody waiting for the notification.
[ew: I tried this using a counter in shared memory, didn't help]

- the pipe buffer will be full at some point, when the decoder thread
is too slow.  For this reason, the writer side of the pipe is
non-blocking, and mpd can ignore the resulting EWOULDBLOCK.

- since we have shared memory, we could check whether somebody is
actually waiting without a context switch, and we could just not
write the notification byte.
[ew: tried same method/result as first point above]

- if there is already a notification in the pipe, we could also not
write another one.
[ew: tried same method/result as first/third points above]

- the decoder will only consume 64 bytes at a time.  If the pipe
buffer is full, this will result in a lot of read() invocations.
This does not hurt badly, but on a heavily loaded system, this might
add a little bit more load.  The preceding optimizations however
are able eliminate the this.

- finally, we should use another method for inter process
notifications - maybe kill() or just make mpd use threads, finally.

In spite of all these possibilities to optimize this code further,
this pipe notification trick is faster than the 100 Hz poll.  On my
machine, it reduced the number of wakeups to less than 30%.

git-svn-id: https://svn.musicpd.org/mpd/trunk@7215 09075e82-0dd4-0310-85a5-a0d7c8717e4f
      bf05ce16
    • Max Kellermann's avatar
      moved code to initOutputBuffer() · 1910df96
      Max Kellermann authored 
      This patch moves code which initializes the OutputBuffer struct to
outputBuffer.c.  Although this is generally a good idea, it prepares
the following patch.

git-svn-id: https://svn.musicpd.org/mpd/trunk@7206 09075e82-0dd4-0310-85a5-a0d7c8717e4f
      1910df96
    • Max Kellermann's avatar
      use size_t · 27f12c17
      Max Kellermann authored 
      When dealing with in-memory lengths, the standard type "size_t" should
be used.  Missing one can be quite dangerous, because an attacker
could provoke an integer under-/overflow, which may provide an attack
vector.

git-svn-id: https://svn.musicpd.org/mpd/trunk@7205 09075e82-0dd4-0310-85a5-a0d7c8717e4f
      27f12c17
  5. 26 Jan, 2008 1 commit
  7. 03 Jan, 2008 1 commit
    • Eric Wong's avatar
      Cleanup #includes of standard system headers and put them in one place · cb8f1af3
      Eric Wong authored 
      This will make refactoring features easier, especially now that
pthreads support and larger refactorings are on the horizon.

Hopefully, this will make porting to other platforms (even
non-UNIX-like ones for masochists) easier, too.

os_compat.h will house all the #includes for system headers
considered to be the "core" of MPD.  Headers for optional
features will be left to individual source files.

git-svn-id: https://svn.musicpd.org/mpd/trunk@7130 09075e82-0dd4-0310-85a5-a0d7c8717e4f
      cb8f1af3
  9. 26 May, 2007 1 commit
  11. 24 May, 2007 1 commit
  13. 22 May, 2007 1 commit