I don't know what current "tuning" empeg has had to it's kernel. I just know that very little writing is enough to make squash skip. (Squash relies on the operating system to cache file reading sufficiently -- since it would be difficult to do this with the current decoding libraries, and the OS -should- be the one doing it). Right now squash is writing statistics to disk a few seconds after the song plays. The writes don't seem to get flushed until after about 30 seconds. But then you get a little hiccup in the song, because there isn't enough buffered data to read.

(The skip does not always happen, so we are probably close to enough read-ahead buffering). A few more kilobytes would probably be sufficent. But I may not be the best judge on what is needed in the kernel .

(The current player only uses 7 or 9 meg with 3,000 songs, and squash uses about 4 or 5 (which I have a scheme to reduce further if need be), so there are definately kilobytes to spare).