[ardour-users] Ardour not fast enough (again)

intent at netpratique.fr intent at netpratique.fr
Sat Aug 27 09:57:42 PDT 2005


On jeudi 25 Août 2005 13:22, audio lathe wrote:
> G'day Ardourist's,
> Further to a thread back in July (ardour-users-ardour.org Digest, Vol
> 18, Issue 28, ardour-users-ardour.org Digest, Vol 18, Issue 15)
> "Ardour was not fast enough" I am encountering the same problems when
> playing back 16 and recording 16 tracks at 44100 using two delta
> 1010lt's. I've attempted to answer many of the questions that were
> directed at Devlin's original post and hope that I've provided enough
> detail.
>

Hello, nice to see that we can use two envy24 cards with ardour btw :)
(i have an EWS88MT)

Concerning your queries, your disc tuning seems great. Reasonably higher than 
my 2 years old IDE Seagate. I don't think that you can really improve tuning 
now. But If you have time, try to find info about the -Q parameter with 
hdparm but i am afraid it is still experimental and risky (you are warned). 
Anyway,  i think that your problem has more to come from the plugins and 
denormal cpu peak when you stop playing. This send 0 or null value to the 
plugins and its known to produce a CPU peak. Even if the plugins are patched 
against it, my observation is that a slight CPU increase still can occur. 
When you have plenty of tracks and plugins it's enough to put ardour out of 
CPU cycles. Hence the dreaded message.

The vmstat output seems to indicate this. Which plugins do you use ? 

You can make the simple test to turn off the plugins and rerun your bench if 
the problem is gone try to enable plugins by name and you may find that one 
is more likely to have high cpu usage when ardour is stopped. 

You can enable "stop plugins with transport too, in the options...

There several ways to observe CPU usage, i prefer "top" but the ardour cpu 
jauge should be enough to know if the CPU is put to its knees by the 
plugins..  Then, its not the fault of ardour.

Hope it helps.

L. 



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