As near as I can guess from observing the player software, each ReserveCache increment (in v3alpha8 at least) corresponds to 64kB of memory. So a ReserveCache=180 setting means that Paul is "throwing away" about 11MB of his new memory, bringing the 48MB player down to 37MB or so.

Seems a tad excessive. Linux memory management overhead is about 5% or so on most kernels, so I would expect a setting of ReserveCache=32 to be more than good enough.

If you could give that value a try, it might help us understand it better.

EDIT: I suppose we should also allow for Pauls BIG database here, another 5MB or so, giving a total of ReserveCache=112 for his player.

Also, with current Hijack versions, there really should be no opportunity for the disk I/O to starve the audio playback threads (important bits of this code are attached here for scrutiny), so I don't think it's the reading ahead that should be the culprit here.

EDIT: Ah, nevermind.. I see that Paul has already tried values between this and 180 without success

Cheers