When I am working I am usually listening to Pandora. Sometimes Pandora get momentary interruptions. This almost always happens when I do one of two things:
Load Eclipse
Lunch a GWT (google web tool kit) project in Eclipse.
The system I am running on has 16 gig of ram and a quad core, yet when I do one of the two things above, I can’t remember a time when Pandora didn’t get a momentary interruption. Oh, if it matters, I run chrome, which each tab shows as its own process.
So my question is, why is this happening? Shouldn’t windows load balance? Even if it was kind of crappy at that job, it would seem that I would have a 1 in 4 chance to be on the same core whenever I either opened a tab to Pandora OR launched eclipse, yet I can reboot and restart Eclipse a bunch of times (I do so once daily anyway) and this is practically guaranteed to happen.
I am just mostly curious as to what mechanics are at work here, although if someone has a solution, Id be happy to hear it.
It’s hard to say, really. It’s not just Windows’ own process scheduling at work, but how audio is handled within Flash’s runtime engine, the narrowness of the window of buffered audio, delays in processing the audio stream packets, delayed locking between Flash and the Chrome renderer, or at the DirectX level, and probably a dozen other factors.
Eclipse is notorious as a resource hog. Windows is notorious for not multitasking very well despite the embarrassment of hardware resources. Two great tastes that go great together!
If it’s something like Eclipse/GWT temporarily spawning 1000 threads to do parallel processing, is there something in windows to restrict the number of CPUs that Eclipse/GWT can use? (Or vice versa, dedicate a CPU for Chrome/Pandora?)
This is almost certainly some terrible, terrible code in Mylyn.
Which yes, you’ll need to manually burn out of the install since it’s packaged with it.
