Sound stucks and breaks if some heavy harddisk load occurs in the background. It happens if cron gets active and makes an update to the locatetools database.

It seems you are trying to run 2 resource intensive tasks at the same time, one of them, VO, being a real time app, and your computer can't handle it. I'm not sure this is a VO problem.

Updating the locatetools database is the most resource intensive cron job I have on this machine I play on. In the past I've set it to just run weekly because I didn't feel like I needed it updated daily. Now though I have anacron installed since I turn this computer off when I'm sleeping or not here. It is configured to take care of running these regular cron jobs which happens the first time I turn on the computer for the day. Then basically I read email and or browse the forum and do other tasks for the first 5 or 10 minutes before I jump into my game time.

It does not only happen, if cron is doing the update, it happens too, if you have amule running and amule finnishes a file; again heavy work on the harddisk. I need to restart the client to get the sound back :/ It does not happen on any other hardware intensive application like ut2004 or serious sam se.

Hmmm. What sound system are you using? I've had that issue with ac97 cards, but not with my current Trident card.

Its most likely the heavy IO load that causes an interrupt-storm. Checking your kernel (Preemptive on/off is a good check, scheluder and IO scheluder) for starvation points is also good.

Alsa tends to do better than OSS for most cards, but the alsa-oss emulation may or may not be useful.

Another thing to check is memory starvation, ie. the new activity causes a storm of RAM to be claimed /unclaimed due to file cache, which will kill performance when vendetta swaps out (ugh.! ) Setting vm swappiness rather low helps here.

updatedb loves to pwn my fps too, try a mix of a pre-emptive kernel, alsa, and NPTL.

I've hardware accelerated alsa (with oss emulation) at a SB Audigy 2, well, I also running a md raid at the root filesystem, but the maximum cpu load from the md raid is below 20%, so the raid shouldnt be the problem.

The kernel is a preemptive one, and like I said, only the sound of vendetta breaks, every other game and application, even the kdetv (without video overlay = high cpu load) does not suffer from broken sound.

could try having it run reniced to a lower priority (the cron job, not vendetta)

Like I said, it's not only cron. Every application, that causes some heavy work on the harddisks (amule finishing a file) kills the sound in vendetta. It does not happen very often, well, it's really seldom, but it happens. Short said, it's not a problem of priority an application has, only vendetta is affected.

Does the game actually use alsa?
Please check options->audio if it says "alsa driver" at the top.

Yeah, alsa is running for sure, I allways try to avoid the oss (emulation).

have you used hdparm to tweak your drives performance to where it should be, its possible your drives are using "safe" (and therefore slow) default settings.

My answer to this would be dont run *anything* you dont need while playing games, sorry, second hand pc's are so cheap these days its easy to set up a download box or simaler and just stick it in the corner, also for most applications (not just games) support wise the first question usually is *are you running any other hungry processes? answer yes, then that is the issue*, not very helpfull I know, but I created a whole new run level for games* which starts just what I need to...

Its not really a vendetta issue though, I also use a linux *uhum, dont tell anyone* at work to play vendetta, I have to run a VM in the backround to keep the illusion (if i need to, I usually dont) that im running Windoze, cron jobs to keep the system up to date/in a working clean state, ect, ect, I have not noticed this issue, and the system has a *uhum, its a work PC, i didnt build it* ATA 100 drive...

Tram actually makes a good point, most basic hdd setups for most the main distros are just meant to *work* unless you do a little tweaking you wont get the best performance....

* With games i mean just Vendetta... =p

[edit]

My cron jobs do sometimes dig into my framerate, but what I didnt say was this system has an ac97 soundcard.

[edit 2]

Quoting a dev, a1 i think, not 100% *We know our sound system sucks, and as soon as we have time, we will work on it* <-- in relation to the beep when hitting.

Well, these issues occurs on two computers:

The first one is my workstation at home, sata soft raid, IBM/Hitachi server harddisks with 8mb caches, 1GB Ram, Athlon FX 55, ATI FireGL-X1, SB Audigy 2... Average transferrates are around 85-95 mb/s at an average cpu load of 13-18%, so don't tell me this "cheap" computer can't run Vendetta well.

The Second one is my workstation at SUSE, it's a dual Opteron 244 with 1 gig, a NVidia Quadro 900XGL, SB Live 5.1, well, the harddisk in this system is bit strange, but here I got a second cpu, which can handle the load (and really does).

And like I said, these sound issues do not happen with games like ut2k4 which causes a lot more cpu load (and the dynamic loading of textures does not disturb the system).