Re: Video speed at a crawl

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.
Before the axe fell it went smooth, Youtube video, TV, videos in news sites, no problem at all. The problem exists no matter if the connection is via wifi or ethernet.
I have tested up- and download speed with Speeedtest.net. The results are 50 to 52 Mb/s, and the connection is specified for 50/50 up and down.

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

 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

  G> 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.
FREE in Terminal Shows this:
raspberrypi@raspberrypi:~ $ free
                total        used        free      shared  buff/cache available
Mem:         8253120     2801216     2426464      603024     3843104 5451904
Swap:         204784           0      204784
Testing with Chromium browser gives the same result as with Firefox

  > Per now this raspi is mostly used for checking news, and there is no
 > problem with that, except for embedded videos that run at 2-3 seconds
 > per frame. Pages load at normal speed.
 Browsing is a memory hog. Have you tried immediately after rebooting and before running any browser? What does the output of 'free' show?

The problem also exists after a restart. Please see above for the output of free.

 

I have used some test from Tom's hardware, using vcgencmd, as shown at the bottom.
https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/raspberry-pi-benchmark-vcgencmd

 I suspect it isn't anything hardware or power related as you would get some outright failures rather just slowness.
 

There has been several updates coming in to the Raspi lately. I check what is in the updates but often have no clue to what is does, and just let it install. But if an update causes havoc like this, other people would have been hit, and it probably would have been mentioned in this newsgroup.

 It's always a good idea to do a backup before a major update, put that on an SD card and see if the problem is with the older software.
 It maybe something has been reconfigured such as going from Xorg to Wayland display systems which your video playing app doesn't work optimally with.
 ---druck
 

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 :-)
Best regards
--
Jesper