[LAU] qjackctl fails to exit gracefully on UbuntuStudio 10.4

[Simon Wise]

fons at kokkinizita.net wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 12:18:57AM +0200, Robin Gareus wrote:
> 
>> On 05/31/2010 10:42 PM, fons at kokkinizita.net wrote:
>>
>>> If an audio subsystem is using 320MB of memory it's broken. Just dump it.
>>>
>> I think you followed Lennart's presentation @LAC2010 [1] explaining the
>> motivation for this: Pulseaudio keeps buffers sometimes 10 secs long or
>> even more. The reason for that is to have the CPU wake up as little as
>> possible in order to save power.
> 
> This is a bogus argument.
> 
> Keeping software buffers does not help to reduce the number of
> times the CPU has to wake up - this depends *only* on how much
> the audio *hardware* is able to buffer. For this reason chips 
> designed for portable use have something like 2 seconds of
> internal buffering.
> 
> 320 MB corresponds to more than ** 13 minutes ** of stereo signal
> in floating point format at 48 kHz.

The first recording studio I helped assemble was a reasonably funded student 
radio studios, it was fully analogue, 8-track, good mics .. at the time digital 
was beginning to be available, but way beyond our means. It was possible to buy 
a digital delay of maybe 10 seconds - I think they were mostly used as a buffer 
on the main feed of talkback radio, or as part of very expensive effects units - 
but it would have cost as much as the rest of the studio put together, which had 
some reasonable gear, and substantially more than a modest sized home in the 
cheapish inner suburb we were in.

Simon