[ardour-users] System was not able to keep up with Ardour

[Mark Knecht]

On 7/29/05, Paul Roberts <raulpoberts at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am new to Ardour and have been loving it so far!
> 
> I have a question about an error that I get pretty consistently when
> recording to just a single track while Ardour is synchronized with
> Hydrogen through JACK.
> 
> The error is :
> 
> Your system was not able to keep up with Ardour
> 
> Specifically, it was not able to read data from the disk fast enough
> to keep up with playback.
> 
> I am running a 750 MHz athlon with two 7200 RPM IDE disks (one for the
> system and one for recording) that share the same IDE channel. I was
> wondering if people had experienced this before, and what they did to
> prevent it from happening.
> 
> thanks,
> 
> Paul

Hi and welcome,
   Yeah, it's a fairly standard problem when the machine is either
really too slow or not configured real well yet. I doubt your machine
is too slow so concentrate on config issues:

1) Determine the speed of your drives:

hdparm -tT /dev/hda
hdparm -tT /dev/hdc

2) Look at your kernel:

uname -a

3) Possibly look at interrupts:

cat /proc/interrupts

4) Post back what environment you're running. I've had many troubles
with KDE. Gnome works OK on my better machines. fluxbox works really
well on all the systems I've tested it on.

5) lspci, lsmod

   There are probably 100 other possible things folks here will ask
you to look at. Don't worry. You'll get it figured out.

cheers,
Mark