[Ardour-Users] High number of crashes

[Gunter Königsmann]

> 
> Yes, but something has to be done about this situation.

Oftentimes a very good idea for something that is astonishingly simple 
as one thinks of it and completely gets rid of the actual problem 
starts with words like those.

I assume the community is willing to go great lengths to save itself 
from hard-to-track-down bugs - all we now need is a failsave idea about 
something that is in our might.

>   As I've
> described in the reply to Paul, a "plug-in certification" status could
> be made which would mean that the plug-ins 1) support of testing mode
> in which real-time aspects are not a concern 2) supports hooks so they
> can be tested by the certifying framework.
> 
> Creativity should not be impeded ! :)
> 

In my experience if you are able to call something a few thousand times 
per second for minutes or even hours from multiple threads and under 
heavy load conditions - and then the same thing crashes a few seconds 
later without anybody doing something different... ...then it is hard 
to do an automatic test for it.

Valgrind does do magic if a program writes to a wrong memory locations 
and one could perhaps write a simple test program that runs under 
valgrind and hope that the problem has a root that this tppö is able 
to diagnose. But I assume there are test tools for most audio plug-in 
frameworks and I hope the calf guys will have run them. If the problem 
only occurs very sporadically it might not be that a wrong memory 
address is written to but might have something to do with 
thread-safety: That multiple threads that are running at the same time 
share a few bytes in memory - perhaps are even allowed to do so but 
maybe disagree on the timing when which of the processes is allowed to 
read which half of which word. ...or accidentally reuse the same bit of 
memory for something they shouldn't. I don't know if there are good 
tools to test for this that don't cost tenths of thousands of dollars a 
year...
...and testing every version of every popular plug-in might be a task 
too big for the community that only wanted to get ardour going: They do 
great things big firms have problems to archive - but that means that 
they work in a extremely efficient fashion, not that they actually have 
enough manpower to do big things.

---

You told you cannot switch the operating system just to do a test if a 
different operating system works more stable. Linux has the advantage 
that there often are bootable live DVDs with the programs you need you 
can test it out with.
Don't know if ubuntustudio or similar contains ardour, but AFAIK an 
ubuntustudio installed on a memory stick lets you install ardour and 
calf. With a little bit of luck it works out-of-the box on your 
computer. One never knows...

Kind regards,

   Gunter.


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