[LAU] reducing xruns (System configuration)

[david]

On 07/19/2018 05:00 AM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>>> What's the output of
>>>
>>> uname -rm
>>
>> 4.17.8-041708-lowlatency x86_64

Back to the basic issue original poster has. Here's my situation and 
something I think is related.

On my desktop, I have Debian Testing. (Debian can't be described as a 
'third-party' kernel.) I have their 4.16.02-2-rt-amd64 kernel running there.

Regardless of which audio device I use (USB or built-in) simply running 
JACK generates at least an xrun per second. Constantly. On the previous 
kernel (4.8 something from Ubuntu Studio), I ran with latency of about 
1-3 msecs without xruns.

Even boosting latency up to 64msec latency doesn't change the constant 
xruns.

The box has four spinning metal hard disks in it. Disk I/O has slowed 
down noticeably. Network access has slowed down a lot. Even displaying 
images on screen has slowed down visibly!

On my laptop, with Debian's 4.8.0-1-amd64 (non-RT kernel), I can run all 
day with the same USB card at 10.7msec latency, without a single xrun. 
No network or video slowdown.

4.8 doesn't have the Spectre/Meltdown patches. 4.16 does. So I blame the 
Spectre/Meltdown patches.

-- 
David W. Jones
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
http://dancingtreefrog.com