[linux-audio-user] Ardour and RAM

[Paul Davis]

On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 12:59 -0700, Drucer Ninetynine wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Could somebody please clarify can Ardour and other
> Linux audio apps use RAM efficiently? What I mean by
> this question is - let's imagine I have 4GB of RAM -
> are these applications aware that "oh I see, there's a
> lot of RAM available, let's use it" and use RAM
> instead of immediately writing to disk which is slow
> and can cause latency issues?

no multitrack recorder on any platform can write to disk "immediately".
by default ardour buffers (user-configurable) 5 secs per track for both
playback and capture. it will also, however, utilize the OS smarts in
the sense that the OS is going to use its own buffer cache to speed up
both write to disk and read-ahead from disk. so ardour doesn't try to be
too smart - thats the job of the OS (at least, if the OS is smart enough
to do this) - just smart enough.