[Ardour-Users] Subject: Re: disk not able to keep up with ardour...

[maillistnoll]

Thanks for the feedback.
 
Unfortunately I'm not in the same scenario you describe. I'm not able to get
through one take with 3-4 tracks.
 
Regarding the mirroring: I am mirroring the drives for the sake of the
system partitions. I've considered changing this configuration, but would
like to understand the root problem first.
 
--kan--

  _____  

From: Martin Lynch [mailto:martin.lynch at shaw.ca] 
Sent: Friday, December 07, 2007 11:58 AM
To: ardour-users at lists.ardour.org
Subject: [Ardour-Users] Subject: Re: disk not able to keep up with ardour...


I'm having trouble with my disks keeping up with Ardour. I remembered

reading this thread a while back and I've searched through some of the other

FAQs and mailing lists, but can't seem to come to any particular conclusion.



I have a 3GHz HT Intel system (Dell) with a set of mirrored Seagate SATA

drives.



Unlike the previous discussion, though, I am having trouble just getting 3-4

minutes of 3 mono tracks to record at 44.1KHz from a Delta 1010. I've run

Bonnie to test performance (approx. 4MB/sec if I remember correctly) and I

believe it should be more than sufficient, though not optimal. I've been

focusing on the IO scheduler as a possible culprit, but none of the FAQs and

other info that I've found can seem to come to any consensus whether to use

the AS, CFQ, or Deadline schedulers. My default is the AS.



Does anyone have a recommendation?



___________________________



I had the very same problem trying to record a few simple tracks and it was
driving me nuts. In my case I had ardour on one drive and songs on a pair of
drives in a RAID 0 (striping) array and couldn't get 20 secs into the song
without the error message about drive not being unable to keep up. The
drives in question are all SATA 2.



Strangely, I moved the song to the same drive as ardour and it worked for a
while. Then that started having problems. What I finally figured out was
that, altho it was a pretty simple song at that point (maybe 2 tracks if I
recall), I'd recorded many many takes of the bass guitar trying to get it
spot on, and it seems ardour processes ALL the takes each time you hit play,
whether you're using a particular take or not. I ended up deleting all the
takes except the most recent one (by going to the right side of ardour,
clicking on "regions" and then deleting takes one by one) and it's worked
fine ever since, but I'm careful to immediately delete any take that I don't
like so I don't run into this problem again. It's annoying, and would be
problem if say you wanted to record 20 off the cuff guitar solos and then
splice together the best parts from each.



Do you have a ton of regions/takes?



Also, why use a mirrored array? It adds overhead. You could backup on a
fairly regular basis (ie after or even during each session) and either
stripe the drives or use one and keep the other for backing up (altho I've
also heard comments that any journalled filesystem isn't ideal for ardour -
not sure if that's true but it sure seems goofy to me that my single drive
performs better than my striped drives which have double the throughput...).
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