changes from last release?

  • robedge
Posted: Fri, 08/24/2007 - 15:04
I just moved my desktop from my practice space (where I had no internet access) back home and decided to do a major upgrade. I ended up getting rid of the old 64 Studio 1.4 system and installing 2.0 from scratch and performance seems to be not as good. I'm noticing significantly higher DSP usage on the new system, right now ardour is playing back 8 channels of audio with no plugins of any kind and no other audio apps running and I'm seeing the DSP usage in qjackctl at over 8%. Doing something like this before(which would have been the older kernel and my own build of Ardour 2.0.3) put me at 1.5% or so. All my settings for jack are the same ones I've been using for a while, no changes in hardware. Is there some kind of performance tuning I should be doing on a new install that wasn't required before? Any help would be appreciated. I'm running jackd with: /usr/bin/jackd -R -dalsa -dhw:0 -r48000 -p256 -n (that's about 10ms latency). The system is an Athlon64 3200+, 1 gig ram, el cheopo SB16 sound card. I was running fluxbox before and am now on KDE, could that alone acount for this?
‹ How do I turn ACPI ON/OFF? Jamin causes xruns count to explode ›

no 8% isn't bad but...

  • robedge
  • 08/24/07
  • Sat, 08/25/2007 - 04:51
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That was a toy session doing nothing but playing back some audio, no plugins, no automation, nothing. I have now gotten my hard disk populated with my projects again and have found that ardour at least is significantly slower than my own build. I'd been running 2.0.5 on the old install, a project that there was running at 6% or was now 40%. So, I built ardour from source and things are hunky dory again, CPU usage is down better than a factor of five. (the project I have open now has gone from 25% to 4%). I'd be happy to send along relevent output from Scons or anything else if that would be useful.

Development list

  • Quentin Harley
  • 05/24/07
  • Sat, 08/25/2007 - 21:55
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Please drop the output on the development list, or open a ticket with the output attached. I am sure Free would love to build a new ardour package if it means better performance for us. Thanks,

8% isn't bad :-)

  • Daniel
  • 05/22/07
  • Fri, 08/24/2007 - 16:30
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I don't think you need to worry about 6% or 7% more DSP load. The difference may be accounted for by some minor change to your setup, but unless you start getting xruns, I really don't think you've got a problem there. If you find the cause of the increase, we'd be interested to hear about that. It could be that you compiled Ardour with different flags when you built your own binary.