[ardour-dev] 6 tracks of 800MB each, is editing supposed to be slow?

[Tommi Sakari Uimonen]

> >Hi. I have 6 tracks, mono 16bit 96khz 800mb each, and something as simple
> >as nudging them (all six channels together) around makes my athlon
> >xp1700+ choke, 256mb memory and 160gb udma100 disk (linux swap is on
> >older drive but it's udma100 also).
>
> choke as in "choke so bad it eventually dies" or choke as in "really slow"?

At first "really slow", but now after starting ardour the first nudge
gives me a total freeze. No mouse movement, no response from caps lock
light from keyboard (I use that as a indicator how badly the machine has
jammed), I don't remember if I have magic sysrq keys compiled in kernel
(and I don't know yet how to use it) so no info from there, only reset
helps. I tried running under gdb but got the same freeze.

> correct. all editing should be lightning fast. which version of ardour?

Ardour/GTK 0.436.0 running with libardour 0.720.0

I just downloaded the nightly tarball, but I'm not going to test it yet
since I'm just encoding a 700mb video of our gig and I don't want freezes
happening now. I'll let you know what happens.

> >Should I suspect some hardware issues or is this normal.
>
> its not normal.

I'm beginning to suspect that there is something weird in my hardware,
might be memory related, since gcc (3.3 series) gives ICE's every now and
then and its memory usage is known to be very heavy. But then again,
ardour shouldn't use so much memory, so it might not be the problem.

Also, I experienced slow startup (4-5 seconds) of ardour (libardour
0.70ish) after having uptime of few weeks, but then I moved from 2.4.20
kernel to 2.4.24, and after reboot ardour started in less than 1 second.
But so was with other programs, they were starting very rapidly, but after
a while things start to slow down. This might be related to KDE (still
using some unofficial debian packages, < 3.2)


Tommi Uimonen