Re: [linux-audio-user] Ardour and RAM

On 8/21/06, Paul Davis <paul@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 12:59 -0700, Drucer Ninetynine wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Could somebody please clarify can Ardour and other
> > Linux audio apps use RAM efficiently? What I mean by
> > this question is - let's imagine I have 4GB of RAM -
> > are these applications aware that "oh I see, there's a
> > lot of RAM available, let's use it" and use RAM
> > instead of immediately writing to disk which is slow
> > and can cause latency issues?
>
> no multitrack recorder on any platform can write to disk "immediately".
> by default ardour buffers (user-configurable) 5 secs per track for both
> playback and capture. it will also, however, utilize the OS smarts in
> the sense that the OS is going to use its own buffer cache to speed up
> both write to disk and read-ahead from disk. so ardour doesn't try to be
> too smart - thats the job of the OS (at least, if the OS is smart enough
> to do this) - just smart enough.
>

Paul,
   I'm guessing that part of the question Drucer was asking was 'Does
Ardour use only the amount of RAM it needs?'

   While I cannot speak for Ardour I can say from experience that some
Linux audio apps are not so kind. LinuxSampler had (has?) a tendency
to grab ALL memory whether it needs it or not. This made it hard to
run other apps on the same machine without getting soome swapping. I
don't use LS anymoe so I don't know its current state WRT doing this,
however as for Ardour it's not my inclination to sy I've ever noticed
Ardour doing anything like this.

Cheers,
Mark
Received on Tue Aug 22 04:15:01 2006