[ardour-users] Why am I so slow ?

[Carl Seleborg]

Hi all,

I just saw mArukqs' message about performance. I'd also like to report 
having successfully used Ardour to record a two-hour session without any 
problem.

However, I feel my setup is rather slow. I have a AMD Athlon XP 2600+ 
(at about 2GHz), 512 Mb of PC3200 RAM, and I record on a harddrive 
that's, to my knowledge, quite allright (it's a slave disk on the same 
IDE than the system disk). I'm on Gentoo, 
stage1do-it-yourself-highly-optimized-kill-your-mother-with-an-axe 
compiled and all. Video driver is nvidia (if it helps...).

Everything works fine as long as I just press the record button and play 
on ; this is how my recording worked, with my jazzband. However, I 
myself do a lot of synth music, and I use Rosegarden to record the MIDI. 
Anytime I switch desktops, I get xruns, and Jack is rather sensitive 
anyway. I know desktop-switching was not recommendable two years ago, 
but with this racecar I got now, there really should be no problem. Or 
should there ?

So question : is there some patches I can apply (easily) on my gentoo 
kernel that will help get the performance I want ? I feel I've activated 
real-time stuff in the basic kernel already. I've read about mm-patches, 
but I'd like to know if there is an easy way to do it (does it hurt, 
doc?). Is there other things I should fine-tune to get my horse on 
steroïds ?

Anyway, thanks to you devs for this software. I don't like to use 
commercial software I don't pay for, and I don't have much money to pay 
for anything right now, so I really appreciate your efforts. 
Contributions will come...

Carl