22 Oct
2010
22 Oct
'10
9:24 p.m.
I had the idea in mind to test my machine (and trying to benchmark the tests), loading the
session with a chain of JACK clients, in order to know the limits of my system and in what
conditions the system is stressed, and when I would have more chances of XRUNS.
The chain would be something like this.
*playing a midi file with Rosegarden (a midifile full of tracks)
*fluidsynth as a soft synth, loading a heavy soundfont.
*JACK RACK for LADSPA effects (load several processor consuming effects)
*recording the session into Ardour, at the same time that monitoring the output to the
speakers
Meanwhile I will monitor the system performance (processor & RAM). (I thing that Conky
System Monitor would do the task of saving a log file for later parsing). I don't know
if it is possible to fetch the number of XRuns from a file or log.
Questions:
-how can I stress even more this test?
-is it possible to make this process standard, searching for a general method trying to
say if this machine, this configuration or this OS is better than other?
-is there something left that I need to take into account?
-is all that a good idea?
thanks (this is just an idea, I won't have time in two weeks to implement something
similar).
Joan Quintana
www.joanillo.org
23 Oct
23 Oct
6:44 a.m.
Joan Quintana wrote:
I had the idea in mind to test my machine (and trying
to benchmark the tests), loading the session with a chain of JACK clients, in order to
know the limits of my system and in what conditions the system is stressed, and when I
would have more chances of XRUNS.
The chain would be something like this.
*playing a midi file with Rosegarden (a midifile full of tracks)
*fluidsynth as a soft synth, loading a heavy soundfont.
*JACK RACK for LADSPA effects (load several processor consuming effects)
*recording the session into Ardour, at the same time that monitoring the output to the
speakers
Meanwhile I will monitor the system performance (processor & RAM). (I thing that
Conky System Monitor would do the task of saving a log file for later parsing). I
don't know if it is possible to fetch the number of XRuns from a file or log.
Questions:
-how can I stress even more this test?
While it's doing all that, fire up some complex synthesizer patches in
Pure Data or csound or AmSynth or AMS or Zyn or some other synthesizer
that does a lot of processing to generate its sound. Synthesizer patches
that generate their own changing sounds would be great. Alsa Modular
Synthesizer has a living_phaser patch and probably other patches that do
that.
Or you could download and install the trial version of the Bibble photo
processing program <http://www.bibblelabs.com/>. It is one of the most
processor and memory intensive programs I've ever encountered. Install
it, do some basic processing of an entire directory of large images,
then have it batch process the images ...
Another thought: add a Windows audio app running under WINE or on a
virtual machine running Windows.
Oh, and install XFractint and have it do a deep zoom somewhere into the
Mandelbrot set.
Then do your email and browse the web while keeping notes in OpenOffice
all at the same time.
I think that might be enough to stress-test a modern PC.
-is it possible to make this process standard,
searching for a general method trying to say if this machine, this configuration or this
OS is better than other?
-is there something left that I need to take into account?
-is all that a good idea?
Well, I'd rather spend my time writing something, drawing pictures,
working on photos, or making music - but whatever floats your boat! ;-)
--
David
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
8:57 a.m.
On 23 October 2010 07:43, david <gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
Joan Quintana wrote:
try MDZ - mandelbrot deep zoom, it uses the MPFR math library to go
beyond long-double precision to as deep as you have patience for. by
default for some peculiar reason it also uses 64 threads. makes the
system very unresponsive i promise.
http://jwm-art.net/mdz/
--
_
: http://jwm-art.net/
-audio/image/text/code
I had the idea in mind to test my machine (and trying to benchmark the
tests), loading the session with a chain of JACK clients, in order to know
the limits of my system and in what conditions the system is stressed, and
when I would have more chances of XRUNS.
The chain would be something like this.
*playing a midi file with Rosegarden (a midifile full of tracks)
*fluidsynth as a soft synth, loading a heavy soundfont.
*JACK RACK for LADSPA effects (load several processor consuming effects)
*recording the session into Ardour, at the same time that monitoring the
output to the speakers
Meanwhile I will monitor the system performance (processor & RAM). (I
thing that Conky System Monitor would do the task of saving a log file for
later parsing). I don't know if it is possible to fetch the number of XRuns
from a file or log.
Questions:
-how can I stress even more this test?
While it's doing all that, fire up some complex synthesizer patches in Pure
Data or csound or AmSynth or AMS or Zyn or some other synthesizer that does
a lot of processing to generate its sound. Synthesizer patches that generate
their own changing sounds would be great. Alsa Modular Synthesizer has a
living_phaser patch and probably other patches that do that.
Or you could download and install the trial version of the Bibble photo
processing program <http://www.bibblelabs.com/>. It is one of the most
processor and memory intensive programs I've ever encountered. Install it,
do some basic processing of an entire directory of large images, then have
it batch process the images ...
Another thought: add a Windows audio app running under WINE or on a virtual
machine running Windows.
Oh, and install XFractint and have it do a deep zoom somewhere into the
Mandelbrot set.
9:27 a.m.
James Morris wrote:
In Fractint's "Deep Zoom" arbitrary-precision, all numbers become
strings of up to 1600 decimal digits. It's a single-threaded app and can
still make a noticeable impact on system performance. Try deep zooming a
32767x32767 pixel image!
--
David
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
Oh, and
install XFractint and have it do a deep zoom somewhere into the
Mandelbrot set.
try MDZ - mandelbrot deep zoom, it uses the MPFR math library to go
beyond long-double precision to as deep as you have patience for. by
default for some peculiar reason it also uses 64 threads. makes the
system very unresponsive i promise.
http://jwm-art.net/mdz/ 
2:02 p.m.
On Fri, 22 Oct 2010 20:43:59 -1000
david <gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
Joan Quintana wrote:
I'm a total noob on this, but will all these tests actually tell you
something about how your system will work for audio? aren't they too
generic?
renato
I had the idea in mind to test my machine (and
trying to benchmark
the tests), loading the session with a chain of JACK clients, in
order to know the limits of my system and in what conditions the
system is stressed, and when I would have more chances of XRUNS.
The chain would be something like this.
*playing a midi file with Rosegarden (a midifile full of tracks)
*fluidsynth as a soft synth, loading a heavy soundfont.
*JACK RACK for LADSPA effects (load several processor consuming
effects) *recording the session into Ardour, at the same time that
monitoring the output to the speakers
Meanwhile I will monitor the system performance (processor & RAM).
(I thing that Conky System Monitor would do the task of saving a
log file for later parsing). I don't know if it is possible to
fetch the number of XRuns from a file or log.
Questions:
-how can I stress even more this test?
While it's doing all that, fire up some complex synthesizer patches
in Pure Data or csound or AmSynth or AMS or Zyn or some other
synthesizer that does a lot of processing to generate its sound.
Synthesizer patches that generate their own changing sounds would be
great. Alsa Modular Synthesizer has a living_phaser patch and
probably other patches that do that.
Or you could download and install the trial version of the Bibble
photo processing program <http://www.bibblelabs.com/>. It is one of
the most processor and memory intensive programs I've ever
encountered. Install it, do some basic processing of an entire
directory of large images, then have it batch process the images ...
Another thought: add a Windows audio app running under WINE or on a
virtual machine running Windows.
Oh, and install XFractint and have it do a deep zoom somewhere into
the Mandelbrot set.
Then do your email and browse the web while keeping notes in
OpenOffice all at the same time.
I think that might be enough to stress-test a modern PC.
-is it possible to make this process standard,
searching for a
general method trying to say if this machine, this configuration or
this OS is better than other? -is there something left that I need
to take into account? -is all that a good idea?
Well, I'd rather spend my time writing something, drawing pictures,
working on photos, or making music - but whatever floats your
boat! ;-)
11:32 a.m.
On 10/22/10 23:24, Joan Quintana wrote:
I had the idea in mind to test my machine (and trying
to benchmark the tests), loading the session with a chain of JACK clients, in order to
know the limits of my system and in what conditions the system is stressed, and when I
would have more chances of XRUNS.
The chain would be something like this.
*playing a midi file with Rosegarden (a midifile full of tracks)
*fluidsynth as a soft synth, loading a heavy soundfont.
*JACK RACK for LADSPA effects (load several processor consuming effects)
*recording the session into Ardour, at the same time that monitoring the output to the
speakers
Meanwhile I will monitor the system performance (processor & RAM).
That's required for the test, not for the result.
Basically you want to test _reliability_ and _determinism_.
At some point all CPUs should be at 100% and you even want to exceed the
physical memory-limit so that the system starts to page/swap. On a
properly set-up RT audio-system there should be no dropouts.
(I thing that Conky System Monitor would do the task
of saving a log
file for later parsing).
I don't know conky, but 'dstat --output <file>' might be handy, it can
write CSV value files that are easy to parse for evaluation.
I don't know if it is possible to fetch the number
of XRuns from a
file or log.
If you start jackd 'yourself': you can use a regexp as qjackctl does
(Setup->Options->Capture stdout):
/xrun of at least ([0-9|\.]+) msecs/
If you use jack2mp with dbus enabled you can grab them from
~/.log/jack/jackdbus.log
Questions:
-how can I stress even more this test?
Add some disk-I/O (`updatedb` or `find /`) and a couple of random
unrelated tasks that cause context-switches (download sth, read email,..).
-is it possible to make this process standard,
searching for a general method trying to say if this machine, this configuration or this
OS is better than other?
a prerequisite for that would be that it's an automated script (+ some
predefined session files for rosegarden, ardour, redistributable
sound-fonts, etc) and verifiable output.
So that one can run the full benchmark a couple of times.
-is there something left that I need to take into
account?
Maybe test with different jack buffer-sizes/latencies.
-is all that a good idea?
yes. It'd be a good thing to run before taking a setup on stage or to
some recording session :)
thanks (this is just an idea, I won't have time in
two weeks to implement something similar).
Rome wasn't built in a day. I suggest to make it modular so that
additional tests can be added later.
Joan Quintana
www.joanillo.org
Cheers!
robin
4968
days inactive
4969
days old
linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org
7 comments
5 participants
participants (5)
-
david -
James Morris -
Joan Quintana -
Renato -
Robin Gareus