10 Sep
2005
10 Sep
'05
7:13 a.m.
Hi,
I'm desperately trying to get my 1400MHz Pentium M with Debian Sarge to
behave just a little like my old 66MHz BeOS system in terms of audio.
But I keep running into troubles. I think I have the latency under
control with kernel 2.6.13 and realtime-preempt, but I've got some
stability problems (probably network related), so I'm working with
kernel 2.6.12.5 unpatched.
Right now my problem is that as JACK seems to work for test cases, but
as soon as I want to do real work all JACK related programs starts to
consume huge amounts of memory, which prevents me from doing any real work.
System:
Debian Sarge with some DeMuDi packages.
Kernel 2.6.12.5 with realtime-lsm module
ALSA 1.0.9rc2
libc6 2.3.2.ds1-22.demudi1 (NPTL 0.60 bug fix)
libasound2 1.0.9-2
jackd 0.99.51-1
JACK starts fine with:
$ /usr/bin/jackd -u -R -d alsa -d hw -r 44100 -p 2048 -n 2
...(or via qjackctl), and simply things like playing xmms and small
samples work. Even a minimal Timidity configuration with only freepats
works, and I can make Rosegarden4 play midi through Timidity.
But then the fun stops. All these applications takes enormous amounts of
memory. All I have to do to trash my system is start JACK, and then
start qsynth (but doing nothing with them).
Is this memory frenzy normal?
Peter
11 Sep
11 Sep
9:53 a.m.
On Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 11:13:45AM +0200, Peter Mogensen wrote:
Hi,
I'm desperately trying to get my 1400MHz Pentium M with Debian Sarge to
behave just a little like my old 66MHz BeOS system in terms of audio.
But I keep running into troubles. I think I have the latency under
control with kernel 2.6.13 and realtime-preempt, but I've got some
stability problems (probably network related), so I'm working with
kernel 2.6.12.5 unpatched.
Right now my problem is that as JACK seems to work for test cases, but
as soon as I want to do real work all JACK related programs starts to
consume huge amounts of memory, which prevents me from doing any real work.
Are you looking at the memory reported by top or so on and using that to
conclude jack is taking a lot of ram?
Jack uses (lots of) shared ram to communicate, so the consumption looks
really scary, whereas infact most of the memory is only allocated once.
As long as you have 256MB physical ram or more you will be fine.
- Steve
10:53 a.m.
New subject: [linux-audio-user] Re: JACK and memory
Steve Harris wrote:
Are you looking at the memory reported by top or so on
and using that to
conclude jack is taking a lot of ram?
No. I'm looking at the HD led, and listening to the sound of my HD
swapping :)
Jack uses (lots of) shared ram to communicate, so the
consumption looks
really scary, whereas infact most of the memory is only allocated once.
I know. But when I look at top, I can usually see one application which
is constantly increasing the percentage, until it get killed by the kernel.
As long as you have 256MB physical ram or more you
will be fine.
I have.
Peter
12 Sep
12 Sep
12:18 p.m.
New subject: [linux-audio-user] Re: JACK and memory
Peter Mogensen <apm(a)bigendian.dk> writes:
I'm looking at the HD led, and listening to the
sound of my HD
swapping :)
You can use vmstat 1 10 to see if you're actually paging (not swapping)
There is currently no way of identifying processes responsible for the
reading or writing, that I can find.
Would be nice to have a iotop;)
--
Esben Stien is b0ef@e s a
http://www. s t n m
irc://irc. b - i . e/%23contact
[sip|iax]: e e
jid:b0ef@ n n
12:45 p.m.
New subject: [linux-audio-user] Re: JACK and memory
Esben Stien wrote:
You can use vmstat 1 10 to see if you're actually
paging (not swapping)
When starting Jack and qsynth (0.2.3-1) as described swpd is constantly
increasing. I would love to post output, but my system is unusable after
that :)
Peter
1:30 p.m.
New subject: [linux-audio-user] Re: JACK and memory
On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 16:45 +0200, Peter Mogensen wrote:
Esben Stien wrote:
Should not be necessary, you should easily be able to use top to figure
out which app is using all that memory.
Sounds like qsynth is the problem, it probably has a memory leak.
Lee
You can use vmstat 1 10 to see if you're
actually paging (not swapping)
When starting Jack and qsynth (0.2.3-1) as described swpd is constantly
increasing. I would love to post output, but my system is unusable after
that :)
5:52 p.m.
New subject: [linux-audio-user] Re: JACK and memory
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.
Peter
11:55 p.m.
New subject: [linux-audio-user] Re: JACK and memory
Peter Mogensen <apm(a)bigendian.dk> writes:
Lee Revell wrote:
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.)
--
joq
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.
13 Sep
13 Sep
12:07 a.m.
New subject: [linux-audio-user] Re: JACK and memory
On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 21:01 -0500, Jack O'Quin wrote:
Peter Mogensen <apm(a)bigendian.dk> writes:
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
Lee Revell wrote:
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.) 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. 
12 Sep
12 Sep
12:47 p.m.
New subject: [linux-audio-user] Re: JACK and memory
On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 18:17 +0200, Esben Stien wrote:
Peter Mogensen <apm(a)bigendian.dk> writes:
I have seen one, but it was relying on a proprietary binary kernel
module... The Solaris instrumentation is being ported to Freebsd, so it
might get in to GNU/Linux as well.
--
Frode Haugsgjerd
Norway
I'm looking at the HD led, and listening to
the sound of my HD
swapping :)
You can use vmstat 1 10 to see if you're actually paging (not swapping)
There is currently no way of identifying processes responsible for the
reading or writing, that I can find.
Would be nice to have a iotop;)
7016
days inactive
7018
days old
linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org
9 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
-
Esben Stien -
Frode Haugsgjerd -
Jack O'Quin -
Lee Revell -
Peter Mogensen -
Steve Harris