Let's try to figure out why music lags after a while.

[Guest Soaa-]

Sup all! I love my Hero. I use it as my primary music player on the go.

As most of us have encountered though, it happens sometimes that music starts stuttering after half a day of usage. The problem arises when the music stutters for about a tenth of a second on wakeup, and could start stuttering really badly and intermittently while the phone is asleep. It's frustrating when I can't listen to a complete song without interruption!

I figured, if the phone is silky smooth soon after boot, but starts degrading after a while, it's certainly a software bug that's causing the hiccups. Looking at logcat didn't yield much else than AudioFlinger warnings, but after connecting through SSH and looking at top, I noticed the process /system/bin/mediaserver was using up to 17% of the CPU all the time. I killed it, and the music stopped, but then the process restarted, and the music started again, though from the beginning of a different track.

But the music was smooth again, and the CPU usage of /system/bin/mediaserver dropped drastically.

That's all I have so far. Anyone have a clue why mediaserver would start eating CPU cycles like that? Could it be fixed in future custom ROM releases?

I'm hoping for the best.

[Guest stevenz]

I had Doggcatcher do this to me the other day, I ended up rebooting the phone. I've only ever had it once, and only since running 3.2b5 with the "taskiller" modification.

[Guest bluecat69]

First off go into setting and remove the tick in the box that uses the network to update the time. If you don't and for example you're on a train listening to music and you loose network connection it will pop up a message quickly asking you to manually input the time because it's not connected to the network anymore (even though it still has the correct time on it, stupid f******* feature), this message will cause a stutter in the music.

The next thing is if you get other updates like peep ones, these sometimes cause a stutter in the music.

Next is if you have lots of apps running, these use up too much RAM and cause the music to stutter.

Next is if you've had it running a while. Just like windows operating systems, the temporary memory and RAM doesn't quite go back to normal when you close an app.

The very best thing you can do before listening to any music is just power it off and then on again (and maybe just turn off the GPS and internet connections).

Hope it helps.

[Guest Soaa-]

bluecat69, you're not addressing the root cause of the problem. The problem is that mediaserver sometimes goes into this state where it constantly consumes around 17% CPU and blocks the audio thread. It doesn't have to do with the clock updating or peep or anything else. It's a bug in mediaserver.

[Guest Soaa-]

So I found out mediaserver is part of the AOSP, in platform/frameworks/base.git, in the folder /media/mediaserver.

Let the hacking begin?