[linux-audio-user] Re: JACK and memory

[Lee Revell]

On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 21:01 -0500, Jack O'Quin wrote:
> Peter Mogensen <apm at bigendian.dk> writes:
> 
> > Lee Revell wrote:
> >> Sounds like qsynth is the problem, it probably has a memory leak.
> >
> > Qsynth is not the only application which can trash the system, if I try
> > to use it through JACK. As soon as I try to do real work with Timidity,
> > it also eats my memory.
> > In general it seems I uickly run out of memory when I use JACK.
> >
> > Simple things work though.
> > I'll try to upgrade my system to 768Mb RAM and see if it still is a problem.
> 
> Try running jackd with the -m (--no-mlock) option.  
> 
> With -R (--realtime), libjack normally does an mlockall() on the
> client's address space.  It may be that some of these clients allocate
> large data areas that are not fully needed, yet get pinned by
> mlockall().
> 
> (Or, as Lee said, there could be memory leaks.)

Hmm, I noticed that all the problematic apps seem to be synths.  How big
are the soundfonts and sample banks that you're loading?  If JACK is
doing mlockall() and you have 250-500MB soundfonts (which are quite
common) then there's your problem.

Lee