Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] HD-recording frustration: linux makes it almost impossible :-(
From: David Olofson (david_AT_gardena.net)
Date: Thu Apr 13 2000 - 05:36:24 EEST
On Mon, 10 Apr 2000, Benno Senoner wrote:
[...]
> > Bingo! Almost perfectly predictable performance.
>
> Nice, but I am wondering if windows users are required to do this too,
> or if they simply can run their hdrecorder on a non-fresh disk , without
> substantial performance loss.
Well, most programs seem to just write files and not delete anything
until you manually run the "clean audio disk" tool. After that
operation, you should defragment the disk in order to get full speed
on new recorded data. Putting other files (project files that change
size all the time, temporary files...) is strictly forbidden - the
stupid FAT seem to just fill in every gap it finds before using the
contigous free areas, causing unbelievable levels of fragmentation in
no time.
> > So, its also possible that your problems are not caused by the buffer
> > cache at all, but by using fragmented files.
>
> I don't think so: during playback only, I can read many many tracks which
> are almost certainly all fragmented since I am testing this on my root
> filesystem, and there is almost no problem.
Real file systems like ext2 (as opposed to FAT) try to avoid
fragmentation. This is (obviously!) done by not filling in the
smallest gaps before you're beginning to run out of disk space. I
don't know what kind of rules and figures ext2 is using for this,
but the difference is obvious if you have ever used a M$ system
heavily for a while...
//David
.- M u C o S --------------------------------. .- David Olofson ------.
| A Free/Open Multimedia | | Audio Hacker |
| Plugin and Integration Standard | | Linux Advocate |
`------------> http://www.linuxdj.com/mucos -' | Open Source Advocate |
.- A u d i a l i t y ------------------------. | Singer |
| Rock Solid Low Latency Signal Processing | | Songwriter |
`---> http://www.angelfire.com/or/audiality -' `-> david_AT_linuxdj.com -'
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Thu Apr 13 2000 - 06:12:29 EEST