Know your hardware

I’ve recently dealed with a problem that has required my full attention.

I’ve experienced a lot of lag while using my mediacenter.

The image was freezing, sometimes there was nothing at all. I’ve suspected the hard drive space required to decode the movies to be full. As I’ve dealed with that problem before and expanded my hard drive space it could have been that again.

It was not.

I’ve checked the CPU usage, bingo ! It was 100% full.

I’ve stopped the video playback and analysed the data, I’ve noticed some peaks when the video was freezing. I’ve thought about buying a better CPU. But after some research, I’ve noticed that my CPU has hardware acceleration for decoding/encoding video. I’ve activated it on the program in charge of video playback and tried again to read a movie.

Hourra ! The cpu usage is now only 60% max when reading a video.

I’ve learned a lot that day, here are the knowledge I’ve discovered :

• btop is a great tool for analysing the pc health.
• knowing better your hardware can help you to take most of it
• reading the software help can help you to go on the right track when facing a problem
• If you want to learn more on your cpu/gpu there is of course the manufacturer website, but also other like cpu-monkey.com and gpu-monkey.com that are easier to read.