# How do I debug stutter in xbmc



## craftkiller (Mar 3, 2013)

In a seemingly random fashion, video playback in XBMC is stuttering for me. This occurs between 1 and 2 times per minute. The hardware is certainly capable of playing the video fine in that under Linux this problem did not occur. Regardless, the specs are:

Intel Core i5 2500 processor
No graphics card (using Intel HD 2000 graphics on cpu)
4 Gigabytes of ram.
2 harddrives from two different brands, one of which is a caviar black. Stutter persists using either.

I've looked at the readout on xbmc and it says its rendering at 90FPS which is certainly enough for smooth video. I used htop to watch the CPU usage and it stays around 20-25% on each core, and the plenty of memory remains free.

Currently I have 2 remaining theories:

The issue is with xbmc v12.0_r3, which means that as soon as the port is updated to the current version of xbmc it will be fixed
The HDD is being randomly accessed aggressively by something else

In the case of the first option, I can't really do much, but I was wondering if there was any sort of tool to chart HDD throughput to see if it spikes at the same time as the stutter.

Some additional information of my software setup:
Login Manager: Slim
Desktop Environment: LXDE
Also running: x11vnc (still stutters with no client connected)

I've attached the pstree, rc.conf, and make.conf in case that helps too. Thank you.


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## craftkiller (Mar 15, 2013)

The new port of XBMC 12 fixed this.


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