Are you positive that the problem is memory and not CPU? Most decoding of audit and video is very cpu intensive. If the audio/video app gets swapped out (of the cpu), you can notice choppiness in quality. A good graphical tool such as Xosview can give you an indication where the bottleneck might be since you can see CPU, memory, swap, disk, etc. all at once and see what is pegged.
michaellong> Is there a way to reserve a block of memory when starting michaellong> realaudio. I have noticed that when my system is running out michaellong> of free memory the audio quality goes to sh*t as the open michaellong> application fight over resources.
Without the source, no. With the source, you could do an mlockall(MCL_FUTURE), which would lock all of the app's pages into memory.
One question, though. When you say your system is running out of free memory, on what are you basing that statement? The output of free? Much of what is in memory is cached. If it wasn't, performance would suck. Thus, the "free" field should report very little if your OS is being at all effective at memory management.
One other question, what kernel version are you running?