Audio after heavy filesystem activity

[Joerg Sonnenberger]

On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 10:50:26AM +0200, Hasso Tepper wrote:
> Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 10:23:02AM +0200, Hasso Tepper wrote:
> > > It looks exactly the same as described in the thread ... It's OK for
> > > some time after boot, but often after heavy disc activity (rsync, hg
> > > pull, even scp sometimes) short (but very noticeable) glitches will
> > > appear in audio and they repeat after every ~30 sec.
> >
> > You have softdep active?
> 
> Yep. Standard DF install:

Highly likely to be the issue. Basically, softdep has two major
problems:
(a) It can keep the disc completely busy with write requests, stalling
reads.
(b) It sometimes also needs very long to process the backqueue.

Both can result in the seen audio glitches. You can try to force the
audio files into the buffer cache, that often helps (cat > /dev/null).

Joerg