[ardour-users] Re: New User / Problems.....

[andy]

On Sun, 05 Sep 2004 01:12:44 -0700, Jason Jones wrote:

> I'm a newbie to ardour, but have been using Linux for about 1.5 years.
> I've got a new ardour system (using the latest version) and it works 
> perfectly.  I'm using it right now with the following system:
> 
> AMD 2500+ Barton
> 512 M 333MHZ DDR RAM
> 80gig Western Digital 7200RPM HD
> ASUS A7N8X Deluxe Motherboard
> NVIDIA Geforce 4MX 8X video.
> NVIDIA Geforce 4MX PCI video (dual monitors using xinerama)
> M-Audio Delta 1010LT audio
> 
> Gentoo Linux - 2.6.8.1-mm kernel
> Gnome-light.
> Nothing is installed but the base system and enough packages to get 
> ardour, muse and qjackctl to run.
> 
> I'm recording a band I'm with and using this computer to do the recording.
> I'm getting about 2 xruns per every 5 minute recording.  I'm at 1024 
> Periods, 2 Frames at 96000K.  Getting around 23ms latency.
> 
> Of course, on a professional recording, *any* xruns is unacceptable.
> 
> I'm just wondering what I need to do to tune my system for better 
> performance...?
> 
> Also...  Just out of curiosity, I've recorded 20 tracks of audio, and am 
> now getting "disk stream underrun" errors while playing back.  I'm 
> assuming this could be because I don't have enough RAM?  Or is it a disk 
> error of some sort?  Is getting it to play 20 tracks (about 4 minutes 
> long) a good reason to have these errors?
> 
> I've never used ardour before, so...  I'm kind of just fishing around to 
> see if these results are normal.. 
> 
> Thanks for any info provided...  If you need more info on my system, 
> please ask.  I've really got to learn this stuff fast, and get rid of 
> these xruns while keeping latency manageable.
> 
> --Jason

You could try using a lightweight window manager like afterstep, fluxbox,
blackbox, fvwm etc. This uses a lot less memory than gnome/kde etc. It
probably won't stop the xruns, but should make it less likely for the
non-realtime bit of ardour to lose track and get kicked by jackd. Also
running ardour at a higher priority (lower nice value) helps with this.
I've been running it at nice -7 which puts it at a higher priority than
the window manager and all the other user processes, but lower than the
kernel processes. Also make sure that you don't have any unnecessary
server processes running. running 'top' in an xterm window is a good way
to see which processes are using memory and processor time.


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