[linux-audio-user] Opening up the discussion

[Erik Steffl]

Esben Stien wrote:
> "Joseph Dell'Orfano" <fullgo at dellorfano.net> writes:
> 
> 
>>serious enough to have a machine dedicated to my DAW
> 
> 
> I would say you're ignorant enough to have a dedicated computer for
> audio;). There is no need for this in this camp. If something disturbs
> your processes, then there is something wrong with the kernel and it
> needs to be fixed rather than trying to avoid it like this.

   not sure if PC as a platform is up to the task, it seems that e.g. 
heavy disk I/O can usually get in the way.

   Plus of course, with different processes runnig you never know who's 
gonna need enough memory for swap to be used...

   all in all, no matter what you can only service so much load so if 
you want to make sure that your realtime tasks are really realtime you 
might want to look into how to limit the load, which is not really 
possible on totally general-use machine (even less so if it has more users).

   just imagine that fcheck kicks in and updatedb kicks in and few other 
processes are started your disk is gonna run out of cycles and your 
direct to disk recording is going to suffer and then you get slashdotted 
so apache spawns 100s processes (or threads). So while having a 
dedicated computer is not a strict requirement youd better watch what is 
running and what else the computer is being used for.

	erik