This is a problem i only recognized because I'm using greyhole storage pooling which uses a custom Samba dfree command, which is a little slower than usual. The behaviour, however, is amarok-specific and doesn't depend on greyhole. When double-clicking on a track in the playlist to play it, amarok is issuing many 'df' calls to the samba server. I count 52 for a simple track change. While this doesn't show up as an issue locally or on normal samba shares, it makes amarok hang two seconds on every track change with a slow dfree implementation. I don't get why amarok checks the free space 52 times when changing a track, so i think this is a bug. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create a samba share with a custom dfree command (bash script: just log the call an return "0 0 1024" as dummy data) 2. Fill the playlist with music from that share 3. tail -f the log file while switching tracks Actual Results: 52 Log entries / dfree calls per changed track Expected Results: At MOST 1 log entry per changed track.
Is it really Amarok or is it Phonon? Could you please provide an output? Please also run amarok with the options -d --nofork and activate the Phonon debugging option as described here: http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Debugging/Phonon
Your mentioning of phonon made me try another backend (used vlc by default), with the following result: VLC: many dfree checks on track change gstreamer: NO dfree call, never ever So i got curious and tried VLC standalone - which generated the same huge amount of dfree calls when starting playback of an mp3 file. I also generated the debug output you mentioned, but i guess it's not needed now. Thanks for pointing in the right direction, i'll see if this can be posted as VLC bug. In the meantime, i introduced some caching in the slow greyhole-dfree command, so the problem is gone anyway - at least for greyhole users that suffered.
Not as a vlc bug, but as a bug in the phonon-backend-vlc, which is also tracked here. I reopen this ticket and reassign it to the phonon-backend-vlc, then. Please attach the output.
Could you please also specify the exact version of the backend?
Created attachment 85242 [details] Debug output while playing a track, then stopping playback I have phonon-vlc 0.6.2 and KDE 4.11.5 installed.
Thank you for the feedback.
Please test with VLC 3 and report on the vlc bug tracker if this is still an issue. Ultimately this needs to be solved in vlc.