pMusic 5.0.0 - beta 3
pMusic 5 is a complete code rewrite of the 4-branch.
Some functions has become remarkable faster, some just faster and a few not faster at all.
The overall usage is noticeable snappier on my low-powered test-machine - an eee netbook from 2010 with a dual 1.66Ghz atom processor. - A machinery not suitable a bloated OS nor music player. pMusic 4.7.4 does not run smooth on this system - pMusic 5 does!
It is hard to measure the exact improvement because of several viewpoints.
- Features related to the GUI gives the user a feel of snappiness.
- Backgrounded functions will not affect the user directly - but the system gets loaded.
- Just running an idle gui will give a cpu-load.
- The actual playing of music uses both memory and cpu resources.
The first and second items are not easy to measure in general, since the result will differ from function to function. The most remarkable individual function-improvement is the building of the radio-station-db which has gone from 7 minutes to 7 seconds on my daily midrange system. This should simplify the radio-station-setup, but
no new features will be included until pMusic 5.1.
The 2 last items are possible to measure and the result is as follow.
Cpu-usage for app to show idle gui and play a mp3 (192kb/s)
Test-PC: AsusEEE netbook 2010 (cpu:2x1.66Ghz atom)
Slacko 5.9.3Code: Select all
13% (gui:4% play:9%) 14 Mb (gui:5Mb play:9Mb) pMusic 3.3.0
12% (gui:3% play:9%) 17 Mb (gui:7Mb play:10Mb) pMusic 4.7.4
8% (gui:2% play:6%) 13 Mb (gui:5Mb play:8Mb) pMusic 5.0.0
Comparing pMusic with other apps with similar features was hard on this system. Apps in PPM like exaile, clementine, amarok are huge (70Mb-500Mb install), and I could not get one of these to run. I managed to run some more basic players and the result is:
Code: Select all
2% (gui:0% play:2%) 16 Mb (gui:3Mb play:13Mb) Gnome-mplayer 1.0.8b
9% (gui:0% play:9%) 7 Mb (gui:5Mb play:3Mb) VLC 2.1.0
5% [gui:0% play:5%) 6 Mb (gui:5Mb play:1Mb) LxMusic 0.4.5
I don't think pMusic 5 has to be ashamed anymore...
But still the most important is the feel of snappiness during usage. And that is only one way to measure - Feel it yourself.
The size of the install package is a total different story. pMusic is miles ahead of its colleagues. 99Kb is close to ridiculous... The 'downside' is that it relies on ffmpeg which is not a part of TahrPup (mikeslr has made a
fix). I see this issue as temporarily, and has no intention to support other backends atm. ffmpeg will most likely be in many distros in the future:
- Ubuntu and Debian has decided to go back from libav to ffmpeg for future releases,
- Firefox 44 has moved from gstreamer to ffmpeg for streaming support
Why a Beta?
- We all have different workflow, and I want to know if you meet bottlenecks that should be looked at for further improvements.
- A complete rewrite will for sure give some bugs - even if I have tested each function after rewriting it.
Thank you for taking the time to give it a go!
Sigmund