[ardour-dev] Ancient history?

[Steve Harris]

On Mon, Nov 01, 2004 at 01:03:29 -0600, Eric wrote:
> The big question on my mind, which AFAIK hasn't been solved, is
> whether 2.4 kernels are still indeed better for low latency than even
> 2.6.9.  It'd be nice to see some experiments on that...  I still run
> jackd -R -n 3 -p 256 and have ardour 0.9beta19 xrun sometimes even w/
> only a few tracks.  I didn't expect that on my dual athlon 2400MP.
> Some other things I'd love others to rule out for me as I may never
> have time to solve them myself:
> 
> 1.  I don't kill every process known to man before running ardour, and
> I use windowmaker instead of twm or something, but I bought a dual
> proc box so I wouldn't have to do that...

You shouldn't have to if your soft-realtimeness is working ok. I run
gnome, and dont kill any background processes. Sometimes I even run with a
(busy) mysql in the background.
 
> 2.  I do use an XFS filesystem that has it's log on one of my 10K SCSI
> drives and its data on another.  Perhaps my 64-bit PCI symbios SCSI
> card (on the north bridge as far as i understand AMD's 760MX) is
> hogging the bus from my delta 66 that's hanging off the 32-bit south
> bridge?

Both of those things sound like a bad idea to me.
 
> 3.  Perhaps I need to not load the modules for my other devices:  PCI
> ethernet card, lmsensors, etc.
> 
> 4.  Do any of the 2.6 kernel settings help/hurt?  Interrupt load
> balancing, IRQ mode, etc.
> 
> I don't feel like the FAQs/HOWTOs have kept up w/ the latest
> stuff...It'd be nice to see people have a place to pool their
> latency experiments with different setups.  There's a lot that can be
> a problem (for example, my old PCI voodoo3 that I thought would be ok
> for an audio workstation proved to be entirely unusable and I had to
> opt for an AGP card).

The problem with that is that theres a hell of a lot of superstition
floating around, gathering it all in one place doesnt help :)

- Steve