[ardour-users] Ardour not using available memory?

[Scott Helmke]

Well, no Firewire disk to test, but I'll probably get one.  There's a small 
wrinkle in getting Firewire stuff to run under Fedora, but it's pretty 
simple thing to deal with.

With a somewhat older 16Gb disk hooked up as /dev/hdd (slave to the CD 
burner) and set up as reiserfs I didn't see any real change in CPU use on 
playback.  Still appears to be a lot of disk activity just playing back 3-4 
tracks, and when I first opened the project I got a couple of "disk stream" 
errors.  The session is over 1 Gb, but most of that is muted or even 
replaced tracks.  Ardour is now using 159Mb, according to top.

On the up side, I recorded a track and the CPU use was only around 20-30%, as 
opposed to 40-60% during playback only.

Any further ideas?

-Scott

On Friday 30 April 2004 17:47, Jack O'Quin wrote:
> Scott Helmke <scott at scotthelmke.com> writes:
> > I'll give that a shot; I've got a spare disk I can use.  With Fedora
> > it's ext3 on /, which is pretty much the entire disk.  I don't have room
> > in the box for SCSI, and maybe not even a second HD since it's one of
> > those little Shuttle boxes.  I've gotten a Firewire CD burner to work;
> > would a Firewire hard disk make sense?
>
> Probably.  No personal experience with it, but it seems like a good
> solution for portable, hot-pluggable audio storage.  Fairly
> inexpensive, too.
>
> I'd be interested to hear from those who've tried it.
>
> > So it turns out about half of my Gb of memory was held by tmpfs.  I
> > can't see why the two tmpfs filesystems (/dev/shm and for jack) could
> > need more than 100Mb or so, at a guess.  However, limiting them to 100Mb
> > didn't have any apparent effect on Ardour's performance or on the CPU
> > meter.  Ardour is still (according to top) using 150Mb.
>
> Probably half a GB of *virtual* memory.  No significant overhead in
> that.

-- 
---- Scott Helmke ---- scott at scotthelmke.com ---- (734) 604-9340 ----
And you'll visualize not taking any chances
But meet them halfway with love, peace, and persuasion
And expect them to rise to the occasion
(from "Glad Tidings", by Van Morrison)