Hi Joey:
Based on your comments, I tried a few more things. I played videos in iTunes, specifically from the Blue Rodeo The Things We Left Behind album. I switched back and forth between the songs and videos to observe iTunes and DPS overhead in the Windows Task Manager. Playing music showed between 0% and 1% CPU in both iTunes and DPS. The videos showed between 2% and 5% in iTunes and between 1% and 2% in DPS. Obviously, neither of these scenarios is exactly straining computer resources, to say the least. I/O requirements were also very low in iTunes, so I don’t see iTunes as a big resource hog regardless of what it’s doing. As mentioned in an earlier post, I also have some iTunes movies, so I tried a couple of them again. iTunes overhead was just slightly higher than playing album videos, in the range of 5% to 8% and DPS was 1% to 2%. My only other observation with movies was that DPS creates minor lip sync issues which go away if DPS isn’t running, but I guess that’s to be expected.
During the aforementioned tests, drop outs were few and far between, so it’s interesting that I get variable results from one time to another. I’ve also been watching other processes to see if I can spot anything that might look suspicious from a resource consumption point of view. When I do the tests, I deliberately keep other tasks to a minimum in my attempts to observe the true overhead for iTunes and DPS. The largest CPU spikes I see are from the System Interrupts task, which makes sense. It occasionally has a tiny spike up to around 20% for a second or so, then drops down to virtually nothing, but no drop outs occur when it happens.
What I’m wondering at this point is if there are problems in Windows that aren’t obvious from watching the Task Manager. These could be so-called memory leaks or something else. I habitually shut my computer down using Hibernate, which of course leaves everything in memory as it was before. As resource usage overall is very low, it’s the only thing I can think of, so I’ll try rebooting every day to see if it makes any difference. I find this kind of stuff interesting and challenging. I used to be a systems programmer and an application programmer at the bits and bytes assembler level. That was a long time ago, but I still have the trouble shooting expertise that goes along with it.
I see different threads about DPS for the Mac systems. How's the overall experience with Macs vs. Windows? Also, I'm wondering about DPS on iPhones etc. I see very few comments, but notice concerns about sluggishness or drop outs. I would love to have DPS on my iPod Touch but, unfortunately, it's a 2nd generation version. I would be willing to get a new 4th generation one if DPS works well on it. My preferred way to listen to music is on my iPod, not my PC.
