i use the skype credit to make outgoing calls to phones and lanlines. the quality is pretty good but when i am on a call if i get a message the cpu is used to retrieve a message and so my skype call starts breaking up. same thing happens if the rss feed reader or i get an im.
Now i want to prioritize all my cpu and ram to skype and suspend remaining tasks as long i am using skype.
is there a way to do this by a third party or do we need to request nokia for a feature enhancement?
Well, you can use htop to renice processes, and once you know something about skype's process structure (I have no clue, but they may use multiple processes, of which only one or two is important), you could write a script that watches for suitable circumstances and renices them appropriately.
(You speak of suspending remaining tasks; that's both more difficult and less useful.)
sorry for using the suspending word. i meant not starting any more processes other than the default ones which are needed for the tablet to run. like for example u have the offline mode where nothing else like updating rss feeds, or retrieveing messages happen durin offline mode.
therotically offline mode + wifi + skype.
i am not a developer and would be great if some one can write such a script.
And that got even tougher; no longer do we just have a whitelist of tasks that we can safely send SIGSTOP to, we have to somehow fraudulize some dbus messages or something. (Or get substantial changes to Maemo...)
The easiest thing is to just change nice values, and this should work fine. Since Skype doesn't need all the CPU all the time, you just give it a lower nice value, and it will take the CPU it needs -- but when it has nothing to do, other things can continue just as before. You should still get messages, etc., they will just go slower and not be able to cause your car to break up.
I used to have something similar for skirmish-driving: playing music, running Maemo Mapper, and scanning for wifi (just leaving the normal connections dialog open, no logging or anything) all at the same time. I bumped mpd two notches, and maemo-mapper one, IIRC; this was back in OS2007 when the wifi scanning would always stutter the music and stall the map updating, and zooming would stutter the music. With everything reniced, I got almost stutter-free, so I'm confident this will do what you want. Unfortunately, I think I lost the exact script (had an example of figuring out the "right" mpd to renice), so it'll have to be recreated from scratch. As I don't use Skype much, I may or may not get around to it, but I'll think about it, anyway. (Anyone else who would actually use it, feel free to jump in and write it!)
I would be interested in a solution to this issue. Last week I was in the middle of a critical call and when the e-mail check started the conversation was interrupted for 10 seconds.
