Sound stalls when album pix update on home page

[ZombyWoof]

While playing a tune direct, jukebox mode, if I click the 'Home' icon to cause an album update, and when it automatically updates, sometimes the sound will stop for maybe half a second. As if the drive activity is interfering with sound file retrieval from hdd. Doesn't do this when streaming to a desktop only in jukebox mode.
Subsonic 4.7, Ubuntu server 12.04, on a Foxconn MB with 4G ram, atom D2500 cpu @ 1.86 Ghz 500G WD sata hdd.
Top shows load average of .03 .13..14 so the cpu probably isn't topping out. Is there a buffer somewhere that maybe can help?

[ZombyWoof]

I did help a little by setting max-memory=512 in /etc/default/subsonic and by changing drive access in BIOS from AHCI to Native IDE.
It's as if some of the album covers are cached and some are not. When they are not cached is when it seems to interrupt drive access for the music file.

[ZombyWoof]

I've whittled away at the OS as much as I know to tune up performance but to no avail. Maybe a lighter distro is called for.
Can anyone suggest a small, fast, Linux for an Atom processor to de-glitch Subsonic?

[ZombyWoof]

Minor improvement seen with change to Oracle's Java but still a problem.
Logitech Media Server runs fine on a similar machine. Not sure why Subsonic has trouble with this.

[BKKKPewsey]

Logitech Media Server runs fine on a similar machine

Similar or same?
Have you checked your pulseaudio priority? I believe it should have a nice value of -11

[ZombyWoof]

Different machine, same hardware.
Good call, nice was set to -11, once I found it. I fiddled around with it a little but made no or little difference either way.
Thanx but still looking...