[linux-audio-user] JACK and memory

[Peter Mogensen]

Hi,

I'm desperately trying to get my 1400MHz Pentium M with Debian Sarge to
behave just a little like my old 66MHz BeOS system in terms of audio.

But I keep running into troubles. I think I have the latency under
control with kernel 2.6.13 and realtime-preempt, but I've got some
stability problems (probably network related), so I'm working with
kernel 2.6.12.5 unpatched.

Right now my problem is that as JACK seems to work for test cases, but
as soon as I want to do real work all JACK related programs starts to
consume huge amounts of memory, which prevents me from doing any real work.

System:
Debian Sarge with some DeMuDi packages.
Kernel 2.6.12.5 with realtime-lsm module
ALSA 1.0.9rc2
libc6          2.3.2.ds1-22.demudi1 (NPTL 0.60 bug fix)
libasound2     1.0.9-2
jackd          0.99.51-1

JACK starts fine with:

$ /usr/bin/jackd -u -R -d alsa -d hw -r 44100 -p 2048 -n 2

...(or via qjackctl), and simply things like playing xmms and small
samples work. Even a minimal Timidity configuration with only freepats
works, and I can make Rosegarden4 play midi through Timidity.
But then the fun stops. All these applications takes enormous amounts of
memory. All I have to do to trash my system is start JACK, and then
start qsynth (but doing nothing with them).

Is this memory frenzy normal?

Peter