[linux-audio-dev] lock-free data structures

[Paul Davis]

>One thing I am still looking to learn more about is how to adjust 
>thread priorities and such to make sure that your threads are run often 
>enough (especially the disk thread), and how to decide how big your 
>disk buffers need to be.

4 years ago, Benno and I measured this and concluded that under some
circumstances it was possible to have a small-multi-second delay in
disk access. Ardour uses 5 second disk buffers. With buffers of this
size, the scheduling priority of the disk thread is not really relevant.

We also determined that 256kB seemed to be the optimal i/o block size
for ext2. Whether this is true for ext3/reiserfs/xfs and others i do
not know.

--p