[ardour-users] Ardour not using available memory?

[philicorda]

Scott Helmke wrote:

>Thanks to CCRMA I've finally gotten Ardour somewhat usable, but with some 
>frustrating limitations.  And still xruns, oy vey...
>
>Anyway, I suspect things would improve a lot if I could:
>1.  Lower CPU usage.  It's an Athlon 2600 or thereabouts, and with about 10 
>tracks recorded, 4 actually playing back, and a very few plugins (simple 
>compressor on 2-3 tracks, single parametric on 2 tracks, and Gverb on one 
>track) the CPU load is around 50%.
>2.  Increase memory actually used.  I've got a full Gb, but top shows only 
>about half actually being used.  Ardour uses around 150Mb, and shows a lot 
>of disk activity even when I just jump back to the start of the song after a 
>playback.  It's definitely getting stuff back off disk even in playback.
>
>-Scott
>
>P.S. Audio card is Delta-44, and I'm recording at 44.1/16.
>  
>
Hiya.
The cpu usage seems rather high. Playing back 11 tracks with the roughly 
the same amount of plugins takes about 40% of my p3 550. (Accourding to 
ardour CPU meter anyway, which I am not sure is quite accurate.)
What buffer size are you using? I use 1024 samples at 44.1k. Are you 
using realtime? (Launch jackd with -R, this can help quite a bit)

This is with the tarball from last night, so perhaps more recent 
versions are more efficient?