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

[Jesse Chappell]

On 10/24/07, sara lidgey <slidgey at yahoo.ca> wrote:

> >What's the sample rate? If it's 92kHz there's no chance of a single
>  >disk keeping up with 64 tracks. At 48kHz it should be just about
>  >possible.
>
> I forgot to mention that.  The sample rate is 96kHz

OK, you are well beyond the edge of reason with this setup :)  I'll
assume for now that you chose to use 96k for some well justified
reason, but suffice it to say if you switched to 48khz most of your
problems would be solved.   That said:

> >What do you mean by "10 tracks ever played at once"?  Is there only
>  >audio regions on 10 of the tracks?  Are the tracks mono or stereo?
>
> The tracks are mono.
> Most of the time (at this stage of production) 54 channels are muted.

OK, this is a common misconception with ardour, muting a track
actually does nothing to save either disk I/O or CPU.  It can be
argued that this is silly, but this way you can get instant reaction
from the system when unmuting.   The right way to disable a track and
save both disk and cpu is to make it inactive, by right-clicking on
the track header, or the mixerstrip name button and unchecking the
Active item.  Doing this for all your unused tracks might just get you
enough bandwidth for your current session.   You can always make them
active again later.


> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda2              29G  5.8G   22G  22% /
> /dev/sda5             419G  141G  257G  36% /home

As others suggested, it is always best to have your session on a
completely separate drive from your system disk, to avoid any
unnecessary seeking due to system activity.  Even better for you would
be to set up a SATA RAID array using multiple disks, which could
actually sustain your high track counts and sample rate.

jlc