[linux-audio-user] The trouble with disks

[John Anderson]

On Thu, 2003-12-18 at 14:25, eviltwin69 at cableone.net wrote:
> John,
> 
>     First, is your data disk separate from your system disk?  If not,
> this could be part of your problem.

The data is on a separate partition, not a separate disk. It may be part
of the problem, but it seems to me not a big part because the pattern of
disk reads and dropouts only happens when I'm playing a session for the
first time. The disk activity pattern is completely different when the
machine is otherwise idling. And unless I go for a raid setup, the
system would still have to read all the audio data off one disk.

> Second, what FS are you using?

Reiserfs

> Ext2 is better than ext3 but still not as good as Reiserfs.  Another
> thing, turn off syslogd, crond, etc before recording.

Recording (one or two tracks at a time, anyway) is OK. It's reading more
than about 3 tracks that seems to cause the trouble. And if the output
from top is anything to go by, it happens because disk reads cause the
cpu to spend too much time waiting on io to prevent the audio buffers
from emptying. I went through a patch a few weeks ago where I killed 
off every process that wasn't necessary, and the problem persisted.

bye
John