[linux-audio-user] Ardour and RAM

Mark Knecht markknecht at gmail.com
Mon Aug 21 18:35:20 EDT 2006


On 8/21/06, Paul Davis <paul at linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

Paul,
   I'm guessing that part of the question Drucer was asking was 'Does
Ardour use only the amount of RAM it needs?'

   While I cannot speak for Ardour I can say from experience that some
Linux audio apps are not so kind. LinuxSampler had (has?) a tendency
to grab ALL memory whether it needs it or not. This made it hard to
run other apps on the same machine without getting soome swapping. I
don't use LS anymoe so I don't know its current state WRT doing this,
however as for Ardour it's not my inclination to sy I've ever noticed
Ardour doing anything like this.

Cheers,
Mark



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