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

[John Mifsud]

>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)

I've seen this around and I think it is because the kernel isn't releasing
inode cache and starts to swap. Eventually the machine deadlocks,
particularly on machine with a reasonable amount of uptime or low memory.
My ardour machine (1.1Ghz AMD, 1.5Gb ram) has the 2.6.1 kernel and does not
seem to suffer this problem (different vm?), but then the machine is not up
for more than a day or two, however I have another machine (dual Intel 600
2Gb ram - 2.4.19) that has been up for 80 odd days exibiting this
behaviour. Perhaps you could "cat /proc/meminfo" or use "free" open and
close your ardour session a few times, repeat the commands and check the
cache in the result. It may have been fixed in the 2.4.24 kernel but when
searching for links below I found discussion relating it to 2.4.25-pre6.
hth


http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/1/16/93

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=89226

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0401.0/1025.html

http://www.stacken.kth.se/lists/arla-drinkers/2003-03/msg00002.html