Comment 8 for bug 355565

This issue is also reported as # 512098. I marked that bug as a duplicate of this one. My comments below:

The original bug from 2006 still labeled unconfirmed in Rhythmbox.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=358770

There are dozens forum posts in google search on this item all redirecting people to use alternative programs to rip CDs.

Used TOP with "show threads" option to display the rythmbox threads during extract.

The top most CPU bound thread was priority 20 (the nice level for background threads) using ~30% of a CPU core (my laptop is 1.5Ghz dual core Intel x86).

The top IOWait was 0.

Therefore, the process was likely neither CPU or disk bound.

I noticed that the BOINC background worker threads were getting significant CPU time, so I hit "pause" to stop background processing of workloads. This therefore left completely idle CPU on my computer.

Afterwards, the extract performed more quickly, but was still not using 100% CPU or causing IOWaits.

iostat reported no IOWait, similar to top.

In conclusion, it is likely the thread design of the background threads is using a far too aggressive "nice" setting and should be bumped up in both priority and IO nice level so that the extract takes advantage of the available hardware.

It should be obvious that if a user has deliberately clicked on a button to extract a CD, they would prefer that operation take precedent over other background tasks on the computer which they have not necessarily performed a manual and specific action to perform (BOINC is a good example).

This behavior was consistent for both Ubuntu 10.04 and Ubuntu 10.10.