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

[Jon Coker]

I had similar behavior with a similar machine (1.5GHz, 400 Mhz FSB) which got 
worse as tracks were added (my machine slowed to a halt with 5 tracks).    
Similar startup behavior too.   Someone suggested trying running jackd 
WITHOUT the -R and run jackd and ardour not as root, and the system 
performance issue completely disappeared.   Of course xruns are a bit of an 
issue that way, but running at 44kHz and doing a few other things is allowing 
me to operate with acceptably small xrun error rate without the realtime 
scheduling.

Maybe you could try that?   I'd love for someone else to have my problem 
(misery loves company ;).  


On Tuesday 17 February 2004 03:05 pm, Tommi Sakari Uimonen wrote:
> > >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
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