[linux-audio-user] [OT?] Sound card hardware buffers and other questions

[John Anderson]

Hi everyone

First question: I'm trying to get my head around how sound cards work.
My Terratec, for instance, has several IO ports. Are there buffers on
the card itself "behind" those IO ports? If so, how big would they be?

Second question: I've noticed that with jackd, the lower the period
size, the more interrupts per second there are from the sound card. This
is because smaller buffers need to be cleared out more often, right? So
how many interrupts per second would be "too many"? Obviously this isn't
a fixed number but would depend on CPU speed, system load etc etc. How
does one go about finding a good balance between interrupts / second and
throughput?

Would alsa-devel be a better forum to ask these questions?

thanks
John