[ardour-users] Unable to record - 'disk system cannot keep up'

[Sampo Savolainen]

Quoting Steven Chamberlain <steven at pyro.eu.org>:

> Hi,
> 
> I've set up 'ardour2' on a new system using 2.6.16-rt29, PAM patched for
> rt_prio, latest jackd and ardour2 from SVN.
> 
> For some reason I cannot record beyond 10 seconds. For the first five,
> everything keeps up and the red/pink areas behind the playcursor are
> refreshed with the recorded audio data. At around 5 seconds the red/pink
> areas stop updating, and the playback/capture buffers drop down to zero.
> About 10 seconds into recording it aborts with the error:
>   "The disk system on your computer was not able to keep up with Ardour.
>   Specifically, it failed to read data from disk quickly enough to keep
>   up with playback."

Does this happen also with Ardour 0.99.3?

This sounds a bit like your hard drive wasn't set up correctly. Run hdparm
on the disk you are using and post the results here. (for example
/sbin/hdparm /dev/ida/c0d7p1). The most important setting to watch for is
DMA.  (I'm not sure if this is relevant on SCSI, but it's worth a check)

Another thing to look out for is interrupt priority and process priority.
Did you run jackd in realtime mode? If you did, did you specify a realtime
priority number (the higher the better). I've seen cases where xruns are
common even when running with -R (realtime) because of low RT priority.


  Sampo