Re: Video speed at a crawl

On 12/05/2025 10:41, Jesper wrote:

On 11.05.2025 22:18, druck wrote:

On 11/05/2025 10:41, Jesper wrote:

For a week or two showing video on my Raspi 5 with NVME is
impossible. The framerate is now something like 2-3 seconds per frame.

First a new observation: Showing a mp4-video captured with my android
phone runs fine.

Sounds like the next thing to do is to work out what video codecs videos
are using, which are quick and which are not.

I would look at what is running on the Pi. Use htop to see what
processes are using CPU. It will also show total memory used and if
there is any swap usage - which will kill the machines performance.

With Thunderbird, File Manager and a Terminal running, HTOP shows Mem
960M/7.87G, Swp 0K/200M.
- After starting the mp4-video HTOP shows Mem 1.14G/7.87G, Swp 0k/200M.
- After stopping the mp4 video and starting Firefox HTOP shows Mem
1.39G/7.87G Swp 0K∕200M. The 4 lines in HTOP above Mem and Swp shows low
numbers, like 0.7% to 2.0%.
- After also starting a video in Firefox HTOP shows 1.74G/7.87G Swp
0K/200M. The 4 lines in HTOP above Mem and Swp shows 20% to 45%, but
goes down to numbers below 20 while the video is shown as a few frames
with like 3 seconds interval.

It doesn't look like there is a problem with the memory. Unless you tell
it not to, Linux often swaps out a small amount of memory for things
like the initial loader of programs which aren't ever used again. It's
only if you see a large and rising amount of swap as you are doing
things which indicates the system is under memory pressure.

Thank you for your reply. HTOP sems to be a great tool, but it will take
some time to be familliar with it. A strange thing is I saw 45 lines
with /usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird listed with 5.7 % for MEM%. That
sums up to 250% :-) So I do not understand HTOP at all :-)

Browsers now run each tab as a separate process, so you will get many
lines of entries. Each process will share the read only code from the
first process, and have their own writeable data. Which is why they can
all add up to more than the total amount of memory in the machine, but
actually only be using a much lower proportion.

---druck